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ENGLISH LITERATURE 



^!^^^ 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



BY 

STOPFORD Af'^BROOKE, M.A. 



WITH CHAPTERS ON 

ENGLISH LITERATURE (1832-1892) AND 
ON AMERICAN LITERATURE 

BY 
GEORGE R. CARPENTER 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 
I916 

All rights reserve<i 



^?H 



-f^-^' 



CWYRIGHT, 1896, 

Sir THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Copyright 1900, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Revised edition printed August, 1900. Reprinted Septsmber, 
190 o; March, 1 901 ; March, 1902 ; Fehruarv, 1903 ; October, 1904; 
February^ May, November, 1906; July, 1907; January, September 
1909.; September, 1910 ; April, 1913 ; August, 1916. 



1.- 



J. 8. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



PREFATORY NOTE 

At the request of the pubHshers and with the con- 
sent of Mr. Stopford Brooke, Chapters IX-XII have 
been added by Mr. George R. Carpenter of Columbia 
University. It is appropriate at this time to recall to the 
pubhc the history of this remarkable httle volume, which 
has, in a way, become an English classic. It was first 
issued by Macraillan and Company, in 1876, under the 
title of A Primer of English Literature, and won the 
warm approbation of Matthew Arnold, whose essay, 
"A Guide to English Literature" {Mixed Essays, pages 
135-153), is a critical estimate of Mr. Brooke's method 
and results. In 1896 the volume was revised and in v 
part rewritten by the author, and appeared under the / 
title of English Literature. The present additions con- 
tinue the history of English Literature through the 
period ending with the deaths of Tennyson and Brown- 
ing, and include a brief sketch of American Literature. 

THE PUBLISHERS. 

March, 1900. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

English Literature before the Norman Conquest, 

670-1066 . . . I 

CHAPTER II 

From the Conquest to Chaucer's Death, 1066-1400 . 32 

CHAPTER III 
From Chaucer's Death to Elizabeth, I400-1558 , . 72 

CHAPTER IV 
The Reign of Elizabeth, i 558-1603 .... 98 

CHAPTER V 

From Elizabeth's Death to the Restoration, 1603- 

1660 . . . . 150 

CHAPTER VI 

From the Restoration to the Death of Pope and 

Swift, 1660- 1745 170 



Vlll CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VII 

PAGE 

Prose Literature from the Death of Pope and Swifi 
TO THE French Revolution, and from the French 
Revolution to the Death of Scott, 1745-1832 . 196 

CHAPTER VIII 
Poetry from i 730-1832 ....... 213 

CHAPTER IX 
Prose Literature from the Death of Scott to the 

Death of George Eliot, 1832-1881 .... 250 

CHAPTER X 
Poetry from the Death of Scott to the Deaths of 

Tennyson and Browning, i 832-1 892 . . . o 276 

CHAPTER XI 
Prose Literature in the United States . . .281 

CHAPTER XII 
Poetry in the United States 309 

Chronological Table . . . . c « • 323 

Index ...-,,.«.•• 343 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

CHAPTER I 

WRITERS BEFORE THE NORIVIAN CONQUEST, 67O-IO66 

I. The History of English Literature is the story 
of what great EngUsh men and women thought and felt, 
and then wrote down in good prose and beautiful poetry 
in the English language. The story is a long one. It 
begins in England about the year 670; it had its un- 
written beginnings still earlier on the Continent, in the 
old Angle- Land; it was still going on in the year which 
closes this book, 1832 ; nor has our literature lost any of 
its creative force in the years which have followed 1832. 
Into this little book then is to be briefly put the story of 
nearly 1200 years of the thoughts, feelings, and imagina- 
tion of a great people. Every English man and woman 
has good reason to be proud of the work done by their 
forefathers in prose and poetry. Every one who can 
write a good book or a good song may say to himself, 
" I belong to a noble company, which has been teaching 



2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and delighting the world for more than looo years." 
And that is a fact in which those who write and those 
who read English literature ought to feel a noble pride. 

2. The English and the Welsh. — This literature is 
written in Enghsh, the tongue of our fathers. They 
lived, while this island of ours was still called Britain, in 
North and South Denmark, in Hanover and Friesland — 
Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. Their common tongue and 
name were English; but, either because they were 
pressed from the inland, perhaps by Attila, or for pure 
love of adventure, they took to the sea, and, landing at 
various parts of Britain at various times, drove back, 
after 150 years of hard fighting, the Britons, whom they 
called Welsh, to the land now called Wales, to Strath- 
clyde, and to Cornwall. It is well for those who study 
English literature to remember that in these places 
the Britons remained as a distinct race with a distinct 
literature of their own, because the stories and the poetry 
of the Britons crept afterwards into English Hterature 
and had a great influence upon it. Moreover, in the 
later days of the Conquest, a great number of the Welsh 
were amalgamated with the English. The whole tale of 
King Arthur, of which English poetry and even Enghsh 
prose is so full, was a British tale. Some then of the 
imaginative work of the conquered afterwards took cap- 
tive their fierce conquerors. 

3. The English Tongue. — The earhest form of our 
English tongue is very different from modern English in 
form, pronunciation, and appearance ; but still the Ian- 



1 EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 3 

guage written in the year 700 is the same as that in 
which the prose of the Bible is written, just as much as 
the tree planted a hundred years ago is the same tree 
to-day. It is this sameness of language, as well as the 
sameness of national spirit, which makes our literatun 
one literature for 1200 years. 

4. Of English Literature written in this tongue we 
have no extant prose until the time of King TElfred. 
Men like Bseda and Ealdhelm wrote their prose in 
Latin. But we have, in a few manuscripts, a great deal 
of poetry written in Enghsh, chiefly before the days 
of Alfred. There is (i) the MS. under the name of 
CcBcimoii's Paraphrase, a collection of rehgious poems 
by various writers, now in the Bodleian. There is (2) 
the MS. oi Beowulf and of the last three books of 
Judith. There is (3) the Exeter Book, a miscellaneous 
collection of poems, left by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, to 
his cathedral church in the year 107 1. There is (4) the 
Vercelli Book, discovered at Vercelli in the year 1822, in 
which, along with homihes, there is a collection of six 
poems. A few leaflets complete the list of the MSS. 
containing poems earlier than Alfred. All together they 
constitute a vernacular poetry which consists of more 
than twenty thousand lines. 

. 5. The metre of the poems is essentially the same, un- 
like any modern metre, without rhyme, and without any 
fixed number of syllables. Its essential elements were 
accent and alliteration. Every verse is divided into two 
half-verses by a pause, and has four accented syllables, 



4 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

while the number of unaccented syllables is indifferent. 
These half-verses are linked together by alliteration. The 
two accented syllables of the first half, and one of the 
accented syllables in the second half, begin with the same 
consonant, or with vowels which were generally different 
one from another. This is the formal rule. But to give 
a greater freedom there is often only one alliterative, 
letter in the first half-verse. Here is an example of the 
usual form : — 

And deiiW-drlsiS : on ^sege weor^e'S 
Wiftde geondsiwen. 

And the (few-downfall : at the ^ay-break is 
Winnowed by the wind. 

This metre was continually varied, and was capable, 
chiefly by the addition of unaccented syllables, of many 
harmonious changes. The length of the lines depended 
on the nature of the things described, or on the rise and 
fall of the singer's emotion ; the emphatic words in which 
the chief thought lay were accented and alliterated, and 
probably received an additional force by the beat of the 
hand upon the harp. All the poetry was sung, and the 
poet could alter, as he sang, the movement of the verse. 
But, however the metre was varied, it was not varied 
arbitrarily. It followed clear rules, and all its develop- 
ments were built on the simple original type of four 
accents and three aUiterated syllables. This was the 
vehicle, interspersed with some rare instances in which 
rhymes were employed, in which all English poetry was 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 5 

sung and written till the French system of rhymes, metres, 
and accents was transferred to the English tongue ; and 
it continued, alongside of the French system, to be used, 
sometimes much and sometimes little, until the sixteenth 
century. Nor, though its use was finished then, was its 
influence lost. Its habits, especially alliteration, have 
entered into all English poetry. 

6. The Characters of this Poetry. — (i) It is marked 
by parallelism. It frequently repeats the same statement 
or thought in different ways. But this is not so common 
as it is, for example, in Hebrew poetry. (2) It uses 
the ordinary metaphorical phrases of Teutonic poetry, 
such as the whale'' s-road for the sea, but uses them with 
greater moderation or with less inventiveness than the 
Icelandic poets. Elaborate similes are not found in the 
earher poetry, but later poets, Cynewulf especially, invent 
them, not frequently, but well. (3) A great variety of 
compound words, chiefly adjectives, also characterise it, 
by the use of which the poet strove to express with 
brevity a number of qualities belonging to his subject. 
When Tennyson used such adjectives as hollow -vaulted, 
dainty -woeful, he was returning to the custom of his 
ancient predecessors. (4) At times the poetry is con- 
cise and direct, but this is chiefly found in those parts 
of the poems which have some relation to heathen 
times. For the most part, save when the subject is 
war or sea-voyaging, the poetry is diffuse, and wearies 
by a constant repetition. But we owe a great deal of 
this repetition to the introduction of extempore matter 



6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 

by the bards as they sung. There is not much of it in 
poems which have been carefully edited, as many were 
in the time of Alfred. Nor do I think that the original 
lays which the bards expanded were more diffuse than 
the early Icelandic lays. (5) It is the earliest extant 
body of poetry in any modern language. It began to 
be written in England towards the close of the seventh 
century, and all its best work was done before the close 
of the eighth. (6) Its width of range is very remarkable. 
The epic is represented in it by Beowulf. Judith is an 
heroic saga. The earlier Ge?iesis is a paraphrase with 
original episodes. The later Genesis is an epic fragment 
with dramatic conversations, and in other poems there 
are traces of what might have formed a basis for a 
dramatic literature. The Exodus is an heroic narrative, 
freely invented on the Biblical story. The Christ of 
Cynewulf is a threefold poem, conceived like a trilogy, 
in the honour of Christ, the Hero. Narrative poetry is 
represented by Cynewulf's poems of the Hfe of Saint 
Gu'Slac, of the martyrdom of Saint Juliana, by the Elene 
and the Andreas. There is one pure lyric, and there 
are sacred hymns of joy among Cynewulf s poems which 
have all the quality of lyrics. There are five elegiac 
poems. There are a number of Riddles, some of 
which are poems of pure natural description. There 
are didactic, gnomic, and allegorical poems. Almost 
every form of poetry is represented. (7) It is the 
only early poetry which has poems wholly dedicated to 
descriptions of nature. Of such descriptions there is no 



3 EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST / 

trace in the Icelandic poetry. For anything resembhng 
them we must look forward to the nineteenth century. 
(8) Many of the poems are extraordinarily modern in 
feeling. The hymns of Cynewulf might have been writ- 
ten by Crashaw. The sentiment of the Wanderer and the 
Ruin might belong to this century. The Seafarer has 
the same note of feeling for the sea which prevails in 
the sea-poetry of Swinburne and Tennyson. (9) There 
is no trace of any Norse influence or rehgion on early 
English poetry. Old Saxon poetry influenced the later 
English verse, but may itself have been derived from 
England. The poetry of natural description owes much 
to the Celtic influence which was largely present in 
Northumbria, but otherwise there is no Celtic note in 
early Enghsh poetry. There is a classic note. Virgil 
and other Latin poets were read by those whom Baeda 
taught, and the ancient models had their wonted power. 
The unexpected strain of culture, so remarkable in this 
poetry, must, I think, be due to this influence. (10) 
The greater part of this poetry was written in Nor- 
thumbria, and before the coming of the Danes. This has 
been questioned, but it seems not wisely. The only 
examples of any importance outside of this statement 
are the war-lyrics in the Chronicle and that portion 
of the Caedmonic poems which it is now beHeved was 
translated from an Old Saxon original, probably in the 
time of Alfred. 

7. The First English Poems. — Our forefathers, while 
as yet they were heathen and lived on the Continent, 



8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

made poems, and of this poetry we may possess a few 
remains. The earhest is The Song of the Traveller — 
Widsith, the far-goer — but it has been filled up by 
later insertions. It is not much more than a catalogue 
of the folk and the places whither the minstrel said he 
went with the Goths, but when he expands concerning 
himself, he shows so pleasant a pride in his art that 
he wins our sympathy. Deor's Complaint is another 
of these poems. Its form is that of a true lyric. The 
writer is a bard at the court of the Heodenings, from 
whom his rival takes his place and goods. He writes 
this complaint to comfort his heart. Weland, Beado- 
hild, Theodric knew care and sorrow. *' That they 
overwent, this also may I." This is the refrain of all 
the verses of our first, and, I may say, our only early 
English lyric. The Fight at Finsbui'g is an epic frag- 
ment. It tells, and with all the fire of war, of the 
attack on Fin's palace in Friesland, and another part 
of the same story is to be found in Beowulf. It is 
plain there was a full Fin-saga, portions of which were 
sung at feasts. This completes, with those parts of 
Beowulf which we may refer to heathen traditionary 
songs, the list of the English poetry which we may 
possibly say belonged to the older England over seas. 
There are two fragments of a romance of Waldhere 
of the date or place of which we know nothing. In 
the so-called Rune Song — which, as we have it, is not 
old — there is one verse at least which alludes to the 
times of the heroic sagas. But the poems where we 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST Q 

find most traces of early English paganism are the 
so-called Charms. 

8. Beowulf is our old EngHsh epic, and it recounts 
the great deeds and death of Beowulf. It may have 
arisen before the English conquest of Britain in the 
shape of short songs about the hero, and we can trace 
perhaps, three different centres for the story. The 
scenery is laid among the Danes in Seeland and among 
the Geats in South Sweden, on the coast of the North 
Sea and the Kattegat. There is not a word about our 
England in the poem. Coming to England in the form 
of short poems, it was wrought together into a complete 
tale of two parts, the first of which we may again divide 
into two ; and was afterwards edited, with a few Chris- 
tian applications, and probably by a Northumbrian poet, 
in the eighth century. In this form we possess it. 

The story is of Hrothgar, one of the kingly race of 
Jutland, who builds his hall, Heorot, near the sea, on 
the edge of the moorland. A monster called Grendel, 
half-human, half-fiend, dwel!&"~-4u^a sea-cave, near the 
moor over which he wanders by night, and hating the 
festive noise, carries off thirty of the thegns of Hrothgar 
and devours them. He then haunts the hall at night, 
and after twelve years of this distress, Beowulf, thegn of 
Hygelac, sails from Sweden to bring help to Hrothgar, 
and at night, when Grendel breaks into the hall, wrestles 
with him, tears away his arm, and the fiend flies away 
to die. The second division of the first part of the 
poem begins with the vengeance taken by Grendel's 



lO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

mother. She slays ^schere, a trusty thegn of Hroth- 
gar. Then Beowulf descends into her sea-cave and 
slays her also ; feasts in triumph with Hrothgar, and 
returns to his own land. The second part of the poem 
opens fifty years later. Beowulf is now king ; his land 
is happy under his rule. But his fate is at hand. A 
fire- drake, who guards a treasure, is robbed and comes 
from his den to harry and burn the country. The gray- 
haired king goes forth to fight his last fight, slays the 
dragon, but dies of its fiery breath, and the poem closes 
with the tale of his burial, burned on a lofty pyre or. 
the top of Hronesnaes. 

Its social interest lies in what it tells us of the man- 
ners and customs of our forefathers before they came 
to England. Their mode of life in peace and war is 
described ; their ships, their towns, the scenery in which 
they lived, their feasts, amusements — we have the ac- 
count of a whole day from morning to night — the close 
union between the chieftain and his war-brothers ; their 
women and the reverence given them ; the way in which 
they faced death, in which they sang, in which they gave 
gifts and rewards. The story is told with Homeric direct- 
ness and simplicity, but not with Homeric rapidity. A 
deep fatalism broods over it. " Wyrd (the fate-goddess) 
goes ever as it must," Beowulf says, when he thinks he 
may be torn to pieces by Grendel. " It shall be," he 
cries when he goes to fight the dragon, " for us in the 
fight as Wyrd shall foresee." But a daring spirit fills 
the fatalism. " Let him who can," he says, " gain honour 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST II 

ere he die." " Let us have fame or death." Out of the 
fatalism naturally grew the dignity and much of the 
pathos of the poem. It is most poetical in the vivid 
character-drawing of men and women, and especially 
in the character of the hero, both in his youth and in 
his age ; in the fateful pathos of the old man's last 
fight for his country against certain death, in the noble 
scene of the burial, in the versing of the grave and 
courteous interchange of human feeling between the 
personages. Moreover, the descriptions of the sea and 
the voyage, and of the savage places of the cliffs and 
the moor, are instinct with the spirit which is still alive 
among our poetry, and which makes dreadful and lonely 
wildernesses seem dwelt in — as if the places needed a 
king — by monstrous beings. In the creation of Gren- 
del and his mother, the savage stalkers of the moor, 
that half-natural, half-supernatural world began, which, 
when men grew gentler and the country more cultivated, 
became so beautiful as fairyland. Here is the descrip- 
tion of the dweUing-place of Grendel : — 

There the land is hid in gloom, 
Where they ward; wolf-haunted slopes, windy headlands 

o'er the sea. 
Fearful is the marish-path, where the mountain torrent 
'Neath the Nesses' mist, nither makes its way. 
Under earth the flood is, not afar from here it lies; 
But the measure of a mile, where the mere is set. 
Over it, outreaching, hang the ice-nipt trees : 
Held by roots the holt is fast, and o'er-helms the water. 



12 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

There an evil wonder, every night, a man may see — 
In the flood a fire ! 

Not unhaunted is the place ! 
Thence the welter of the waves is upwhirled on high. 
Wan towards the clouds, when the wind is stirring 
Wicked weather up; till the lift is waxing dark, 
And the welkin weeping ! 

The whole poem, Pagan as it is, is English to its very root. 
It is sacred to us, our Genesis, the book of our origins. ^ 

9. Christianity and English Poetry. — When we came 
to Britain we were great warriors and great sea pirates 
— "sea wolves," as a Roman poet calls us; and all our 
poetry down to the present day is full of war, and still 
more of the sea. No nation has ever written so much 
sea-poetry. But we were more than mere warriors. We 
were a home-loving people when we got settled either in 
Sleswick or in England, and all our literature from the 
first writings to the last is full of domestic love, the dear- 
ness of home, and the ties of kinsfolk. We were a re- 
ligious people, even as heathen, still more so when we 
became Christian, and our poetry is as much of religion 
as of war. But with Christianity a new spirit entered 
into English poetry. The war spirit did not decay, but 
into the song steals a softer element. The fatahsm is 
modified by the faith that the fate is the will of a good 
God. The sorrow is not less, but it is relieved by an on- 
look of joy. The triumph over enemies is not less, but 
even more exulting, for it is the triumph of God over His 
foes that is sung by Csedmon and Cynewulf. Nor is the 



EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1 3 

imaginative delight in legends and in the supernatural 
less. But it is now found in the legends of the saints, in 
the miracles and visions of angels that Baeda tells of the 
Christian heroes, in fantastic allegories of spiritual things, 
like the poems of the Phoenix and the Whale. The love 
of nature lasted, but it dwells now rather on gentle than 
on savage scenery. The human sorrow for the hardness 
of life is more tender, and when the poems speak of the 
love of home, it is with an added grace. One little bit 
still lives for us out of the older world. 

Dear the welcomed one 
To his Frisian wife, when his Floater's drawn on shore, 
When his keel comes back, and her man returns to home ; 
Hers, her own food-giver. And she prays him in, 
Washes then his weedy coat, and new weeds puts on him ! 
O lythe it is on land to him whom his love constrains. 

If that was the soft note of home in a Pagan time, it 
was softer still when Christianity had mellowed manners. 
Yet, with all this, the ancient faith still influences the 
Christian song. Christ is not only the Saviour, but the 
Hero who goes forth against the dragon. His overthrow 
of the fiends is described in much the same terms as that 
of Beowulf's wrestling with Grendel. " Bitterly grim, 
gripped them in his wrath." The death of Christ, at 
which the universe trembles and weeps, was mixed up 
afterwards with the story of the death of Balder. The 
old poetry penetrated the new, but the spirit of the new 
transformed that of the old. 



14 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

lo. Caedmon. — The poem of Beowulf has the grave 
Teutonic power, but it is not, as a whole, native to our 
soil. It is not the first true English poem. That is the 
work of C^DMON, and it was done in Northumbria. The 
story of it, as told by Baeda, proves that the making of 
songs was common at the time. Caedmon was a servant 
to the monastery of Hild, an abbess of royal blood, at 
Whitby in Yorkshire. He was somewhat aged when the 
gift of song came to him, and he knew nothing of the 
art of verse, so that at the feasts when for the sake of 
mirth all sang in turn he left the table. One evening, 
having done so and gone to the stables, for he had the care 
of the cattle that night, he fell asleep, and One came to 
him in vision and said, " Caedmon, sing me some song." 
And he answered, " I cannot sing ; for this cause I left 
the feast and came hither." Then said the other, " How- 
ever, you shall sing." "What shall I sing ?" he repHed. 
"Sing the beginning of created things," answered the 
other. Whereupon he began to sing verses to the praise 
of God, and, awaking, remembered what he had sung, 
and added more in verse worthy of God. In the morn- 
ing he came to the town-reeve, and told him of the gift 
he had received, and, being brought to Hild, was ordered 
to tell his dream before learned men, that they might 
give judgment whence his verses came. And when they 
had heard, they all said that heavenly grace had been 
conferred on him by our Lord. This story ought to be 
loved by us, for it tells of the beginning in England of 
the wonderful life of EngHsh Poetry. Nor should we 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1 5 

fail to reverence the place where it began. Above the 
small and land-locked harbour of Whitby rises and juts 
out towards the sea the dark cliff where Hild's monastery 
stood, looking out over the German Ocean. It is a wild, 
wind-swept upland, above the furious sea ; and standing 
there we feel that it is a fitting birthplace for the poetry 
of the sea-ruling nation. Nor is the verse of the first 
poet without the stormy note of the sea-scenery among 
which it was written, nor without the love of the stars and 
the high moorlands that Caedmon saw from Whitby Head. 
Caedmon's poems were done before 680, in which year 
he died. Baeda tells us that he sang the story of Genesis 
and Exodus, many other tales in the Sacred Scriptures, 
and the story of Christ and the Apostles and of Heaven 
and Hell to come. "Others after him tried to make 
religious poems, but none could compare with him for he 
learnt the art of song not from men, but, divinely aided, 
received that gift." It is plain then that he was the 
founder of a school. It is equally plain, it seems, from 
this passage, that at Bseda's death the later school of 
religious poets, of whom Cynewulf was the chief, had not 
begun to write. Caedmon's poems, then, were widely 
known. Bseda quotes their first verses. They were 
copied from monastery to monastery. yElfred got them 
from the north, and no doubt gave them to the great 
schools at Winchester. They were however lost. Only 
their fame survived. 

II. The Juniaii Caedmon. — Archbishop Ussher, hunt- 
ing for books for Trinity College, Dublin, found an Old 



l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

English MS. which Francis Dujon (Junius) printed in 
Amsterdam about 1650, and pubhshed as the work of 
Caedmon, because its contents agreed with Baeda's de- 
scription of Csedmon's poems and of his first hymn. 
Junius was a friend of Milton, and Milton was one of the 
first to hear what the earHest English poet was supposed 
to have written on the Fall of the Angels and the Fall of 
Man. Since then critics have wrought their will upon 
this MS. Some say that Csedmon did not write a line of 
it ; others allow him some share in it. It pleases us to 
think, and the judgment is possible, that the more 
archaic portion of the first poem in the MS. — the Genesis 
— which describes the Fall of the Angels and the Crea- 
tion, the Flood, and perhaps the battle of Abraham with 
the kings of the East is by Csedmon himself. In the 
midst of the Genesis there is however a second descrip- 
tion of the Fall of the Angels and an elaborate account of 
the council in Hell, and of the temptation in the Garden. 
This is held to be an after-insertion, made perhaps in the 
time of Alfred. It differs in feeling, in subtlety, and in 
manner of verse from the rest. A conjecture was made 
that it was a translation of a part of an Old Saxon poem, 
and this seems to be borne out by the discovery in 1894 
of a fragment of Old Saxon poetry in which there are 
fines similar to those of this separated portion of the 
Genesis. The next poem in the MS. is the Exodus. It 
is certainly not by Caedmon. It is not a paraphrase ; it 
is a triumphal poem of war, boldly invented, on the pas- 
sage of the Red Sea. The Daniel^ the third poem of the 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1/ 

MS., is so dull that it is no matter who wrote it or when 
it was written. The second part of the MS. is in a differ- 
ent handwriting from the first, and is a series of Psalm- 
like poems on the Fall of the Angels, the Harrowing of 
Hell, the Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost, the Judg- 
ment Day, and the Temptation. They are a kind of 
Paradise Regained. 

12. The interest of these poems is not found in any 
paraphrase of the Scriptures, but in those parts of them 
which are the invention of the poets, in the drawing of 
the characters, in the passages instinct with the genius of 
our race, and with the individuality of the writers. The 
account of the creation in the older Genesis has the 
grandeur of a nature-myth. The description of the flood 
is full of the experience of one who had known the sea in 
storm. The battle of Abraham is a fine clash of war, and 
might be the description of the repulse by some Nor- 
thumbrian king of the northern tribes. The ruin of the 
angels and the peace of Heaven, set in contrast, have the 
same kind of proud pathos as Milton's work on the same 
subject. The later Genesis is even more Teutonic than 
the first. Satan's fierce cry of wrath and freedom against 
God from his bed of chains in Hell is out of the heart of 
heathendom. The northern rage of war and the northern 
tie of war-brotherhood speak in all he says, in all that his 
thegns reply. The pleasure of the northern imagination 
in swiftness and joy is just as marked as its pleasure in 
dark pride and in revenge. The burst of exulting ven- 
geance when the thegn of Satan succeeds in the tempta- 
. c 



1 8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

tion is magnificent. His master, he cries, will lie softly 
and be blithe of heart in the dusky fire, now that his 
revenge is gained. There is true dramatic power in the 
dialogue between Eve and the fiend, and so much subtlety 
of thought that it cannot belong to Caedmon's time. It is 
characteristic of Teutonic manners that the motives of 
the woman for eating the fruit are all good, and the pas- 
sionate and tender conscientiousness of the love and 
repentance of Adam and Eve is equally characteristic of 
the gentler and more religious side of the Teutonic 
nature. "Dark and true and tender is the North." 

The Exodus is remarkable for its descriptions of war 
and a marching host, and especially for the elaborate 
painting of the breaking up of the sea, which was prob- 
ably done by one who had himself battled with a whirling 
gale on the German Ocean. On the whole, we have in 
the two parts of the Genesis, and in the Exodus, in the 
midst of spaces of dulness, original and imaginative 
pieces of poetry well worthy of the beginnings of English 
song. 

13. English in the South. — While Caedmon was still 
alive, Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his sub- 
deacon Hadrian set up a celebrated school of learning at 
Canterbury, which flourished for a short time and then 
decayed. One of Theodore's scholars was Ealdhelm. 
A young man when Caedmon died in 680, his name is 
connected with English poetry. As Abbot of Malmes- 
bury and Bishop of Sherborne he spread the learning of 
Canterbury over the south of England, and sent his in- 



r EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST IQ 

fluence into Northumbria, where his Riddles were imi- 
tated by Cynewulf. But our chief interest in him is that 
he was himself an Enghsh poet. It is said that he had 
not his equal in the making and singing of Enghsh verse. 
One of his songs was popular in the twelfth century. 
Alfred had some in his possession, and a pretty story 
tells that when the traders came into the towns, Eald- 
helm used, hke a gleeman, to stand on the bridge or the 
public way and sing songs to them in the English tongue, 
that he might lure them by the sweetness of his speech 
to hear the word of God. 

14. English Poetry in the North after Caedmon — 
"Judith." — We have seen that English poetry began 
with religion in the poems of Caedmon, and the greater 
part of the written poetry which followed him is also 
religious. One of the best of these pieces is the Judith. 
Originally composed in twelve books, we only possess 
the three last which tell of the banquet of Holofernes, 
his slaughter, and the attack of the Jews on the Assyrian 
camp. It is a poem made after Baeda's death, full of 
the flame and joy of war. Nor is the drawing of the 
person and character of Judith unworthy of a race which 
has always honoured women. She stands forth clear, 
a Jewish Velleda. To call the poem, however, as some 
have done, the finest of the Old English poems, is to 
say a great deal too much. We may date, about the 
same time, in the eighth century, a fine fragment on the 
Harrowing of Hell, some poems on Christian legends, 
perhaps the allegorical poems of the Whale and the 



20 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP, 

Panther^ and some lyrical translations of the Psalms in 
the Kentish and West Saxon dialects. 

15. There are five Elegies in the Exeter Book, which 
from their excellence deserve to be isolated from the 
rest of the minor poems. The first of these has been 
called the Ruin. It is the mourning of a traveller over 
a desolated city, and certain phrases in it seem to show 
that the city was Bath, utterly overthrown by Ceawlin 
in 577. If so, the date of the poem may be between 
676 when Osric founded a monastery among the ruins, 
and 781 when Offa rebuilt the town. The second, the 
Wanderer, expands the mourning " motive " of the Ruin 
over the desolation of the whole world of man. It may 
have been originally a heathen poem, edited afterwards 
with a Christian Prologue and Epilogue. Of all the Old 
English poems it is the most of an artistic whole, and a 
noble piece of work it is. In its grave and fateful verse 
an exile bewails his own lost happiness and the sorrow- 
ful fates of men. The third, the Seafarer, apparently 
a dialogue between an old and a young sailor about the 
dangers and the fascination of the sea, breathes the 
spirit which filled the heart of our forefathers while they 
sang and sailed, and is extraordinarily modern in note. 
The blank-verse manner of Tennyson is in it, and the 
spirit of it is strangely re-echoed in the Sailor Boy. 
The same may be said of the two other elegies — the 
Wife's Complaint and the Husbajid's Message. They 
are not of so fine a quality as the Wanderer or the 
Seafai-er, but they both have love-passion, otherwise 



2 EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 21 

unrepresented in Old English poetry. To these must be 
added the dramatic monologue, formerly regarded as 
the First Riddle. As recently interpreted, it should 
be known as Wulf and Eadwacer. 

1 6. Cynewulf was the greatest of the northern singers, 
and wrote, most people think, during the latter half of 
the eighth century. His name is known to us, and he 
is the only one of these poets of whose personality and 
life we have some clear image, and whose work is so 
wide in range and so varying in quality that it may be 
divided into periods. He has signed his name in its 
runic letters to four of his poems. The riddling com- 
mentary he linked on to the runes gives some account 
of his life, and the poems are throughout as personal 
as Milton's. He was often a wandering singer, but 
seems to have had, in his youth, a fixed place at the 
court of some northern noble — a wild and gay young 
man, a rider, a singer at the feasts, fond of sports and 
war, indifferent to rehgion, sensitive to love and beauty, 
and at home with all classes of men. It must have been 
during this time that he wrote the greater number of 
the Riddles. They prove that he had a poet's sympathy 
with the life of man and nature. They are written by 
one who knew the sea and its dangers, the iron coasts 
and storms of Northumbria, who knew and had taken 
part in war, who knew the forest-land, the scattered 
villages and their daily hfe ; who loved the wild animals 
and the birds, and who, strange to say at this early time, 
wrote about nature with an observant and loving eye 



22 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and in a way we do not meet again in English poetry 
for many centuries. The poem on the Hurricane is 
an artistic whole, and may not be unjustly compared 
with Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. There is scarcely 
a trace of Christianity in these early poems. Trouble 
then fell on Cynewulf, and with it repentance for his 
" sinful life," and he tells in the Dream of the Rood 
of how comfort was brought to him at last. He then 
turned to write religious poems, and to this part of his 
life we may allot \\\& Juliana, and perhaps the first part 
of the Gudlac. He then wrote, and with a far higher 
art, the Crist, a long, almost an epical, poem of the 
Incarnation, the Descent into Hell, the Ascension, and 
the Last Judgment, a noble and continuous effort, full 
of triumphant verse. He had now reached full peace 
of mind, and as much mastery over his art as was pos- 
sible at that early time. He may then have composed, 
from a poem now given to Lactantius, the allegorical 
poem of the Phoenix, in which there is a famous passage 
describing the sinless land ; the second part of the 
Giidlac, as fine as the first is poor ; and still later on 
in life, and with a free recurrence to the war-poetry 
of heathendom, the Ele?ie and the Andreas, the first, 
the finding of the True Cross by the Empress Helena, 
and remarkable for its battle-fervour ; the second equally 
remarkable for its imaginative treatment of the voyage 
of St. Andrew for the conversion of the Marmedonians. 
Then, before he died, and to leave his last message 
to his folk, he wrote, using perhaps part of an older 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 23 

poem, the Dream of the Holy Rood, and showed that 
even in his old age his imagination and his versing were 
as vivid as in his youth. 

17. Poetry during and after Alfred's Reign When 

Alfred set up learning afresh in the south, it had perished 
in Northumbria. But no great poetry arose in the south. 
There was alliterative versing, but it had neither imagina- 
tion, originahty, nor music. The English alliterative ver- 
sion of the Metra of Boethius may be Alfred's own ; if 
so, he was plainly not a poet. The second part of the 
Genesis may belong to this time, but it is asserted now 
to be a translation. I do not believe that the last poems 
in the Csedmonic MS. are of this time, but of the Nor- 
thumbrian School. It was a time, however, of collections 
of the poetry of the past. Nearly all the Old English 
poetry, as we have it, is in the West-Saxon Dialect. 
Alfred had a Handbook, into which, tradition says, he 
copied some English songs. It is extremely likely that 
the poems in the Exeter Book were brought together in 
Alfred's time. In that book itself there are gnomic and 
didactic poems, as, for example, the Fates of Men and 
the Gifts of Men, which are collections of short verses 
belonging to various times, and some of them are very 
old. At a later period than Alfred's reign, these gnomic 
verses took the form of dialogues, partly in prose and 
partly in verse, and we have two incomplete specimens 
of this in the Solomon and Saturnus, in which a Judaic 
legend is curiously mingled with Teutonic forms of 
thought. To the same period may be allotted the 



24 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Menologiiun, a poetical calendar, the best portions of 
which seem borrowed from the past. The rest of the 
verse up to the Conquest is chiefly made up of allitera- 
tive sermons and the war songs. 

1 8. The War-poetry was probably always as plentiful 
as the religious, but was not likely to be written down 
by the monks. When, however, Alfred developed the 
Chronicle into a national history, the writers seized on 
popular songs, and inserted them in the Chronicle. In 
that way we have at least one fine war-poem handed 
down to us — The Song of Bi-unanburh, 937. It de- 
scribes the fight of King ^thelstan with Anlaf the Dane 
and the Scots under Constantine. Another war-poem is 
the Fight at Maldon, the story of the death of Byrhtnoth, 
an East Saxon Ealdorman, in battle with a band of Vik- 
ings. They are the fitting source, in their simplicity and 
patriotism, of such war-songs as the Battle of the Baltic 
and the Siege of Lucknow. Of the two the Fight at 
Maldon is the finer, the most human and varied, but the 
Song of Brunanburh is lyrical as the latter is not. They 
are two different types of poetry. Both of them have 
some Norse feeling, and we may link with them from this 
point of view the Rhyme Song, which recalls the motive 
and spirit of the earlier Ruin, but which, having rhymes 
along with alliteration, resembles the Scandinavian form 
called Runhenda, and has induced critics to attribute it 
to the influence of the warrior and scald, Egil Skala- 
grimsson, who twice visited King ^thelstan. Two frag- 
mentary odes, among some other short poems, inserted 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 2^ 

in the Chronicle, one on the deliverance of the five cities 
from the Danes by King Eadmund, 942 ; and another 
on the coronation of King Eadgar, are the last records 
of a war-poetry which naturally decayed when the Eng- 
lish were trodden down by the Normans. When Taille- 
fer rode into battle at Hastings, singing songs of Roland 
and Charlemagne, he sang more than the triumph of the 
Norman over the English ; he sang the victory for a time 
of French Romance over Old English poetry. 

19. Old English Prose. — It is pleasant to think that 
we may not unfairly make English prose begin with 
BiEDA. He was born about 673, and was like Csedmon, 
a Northumbrian. After 683, he spent his life at Jar row, 
"in the same monastery," he says, "and while attentive 
to the rule of mine order, and the service of the Church, 
my constant pleasure lay in learning, or teaching, or 
writing." He enjoyed that pleasure for many years, for 
his quiet life was long, and his toil unceasing. Forty- 
five works prove his industry ; and their fame over the 
whole of learned Europe proves their value. His learn- 
ing was as various as it was great. All that the world 
then knew of theology, science, music, rhetoric, medi- 
cine, arithmetic, astronomy, and physics was brought 
together by him ; his Ecclesiastical History is our best 
authority for Early England ; accuracy and delightful- 
ness are at one in it. It reveals his charming character ; 
and indeed, his life was as gentle, and himself as loved, 
as his work was great. His books were written in Latin, 
and with these we have nothing to do, but he strove to 



26 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

make English prose a literary language, for his last work 
was a Translation of the Gospel of St. John, as almost 
his last words were in English verse. In the story of his 
death told by his disciple Cuthbert is the first record 
of Enghsh prose writing. When the last day came, the 
dying man called his scholars to him that he might 
dictate more of his translation. " There is still a chap- 
ter wanting," said the scribe, "and it is hard for thee 
to question thyself longer." *' It is easily done," said 
Baeda, " take thy pen and write swiftly." Through the 
day they wrote, and when evening fell, " There is yet one 
sentence unwritten, dear master," said the youth. " Write 
it quickly," said the master. " It is finished now." 
"Thou sayest true," was the reply, "all is finished now." 
He sang the " Glory to God " and died. It is to that 
scene that Enghsh prose looks back as its sacred source, 
as it is in the greatness and variety of Baeda's Latin work 
that English scholarship strikes its key-note. 

When Baeda died, Northumbria was the centre of 
European literature. Wilfrid of York had founded libra- 
ries and monasteries, but the true beginner of all the 
Northumbrian learning was Benedict Biscop, who col- 
lected two brother libraries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, 
and whose scholars were Ceolfrid and Baeda. Six hun- 
dred scholars gathered round Baeda, and he handed on 
all his learning to his pupil Ecgberht, who as Archbishop 
of York established the famous hbrary, and founded the 
great school, or, as it may be called, the University of 
York. To this place, for more than sixty years, all 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 2/ 

Europe sent pupils to win the honey of learning. Al- 
cuin, Ecgberht's pupil, finally took with. him to the court 
of Charles the Great, in 792, all the knowledge which 
Bsda had won and the School of York had expanded. 
Through Alcuin then, whom we may call Charles's Min- 
ister of Education, England was the source of the new 
education which slowly spread over the vast sphere of 
the Prankish Empire. This was done just at the right 
moment, for Alcuin had scarce left the English shores 
for the last time when the Danes descended on Nor- 
thumbria, and blotted out the whole of its hterature and 
learning. 

20. -Alfred. — Though the long battle with the in- 
vaders was lost in the north, it was gained for a time by 
^Ifired the Great in Wessex ; and with Alfred's literary 
work, learning changed its seat from the north to the 
south. Alfred's writings and translations, being in Eng- 
lish and not in Latin, make him, since Bseda's work is 
lost, the true father of English prose. As Whitby is the 
cradle of English poetry, so is Winchester of English 
prose. At Winchester the king took the English tongue 
and made it the tongue in which history, philosophy, 
law, and religion spoke to the English people. No work 
was ever done more eagerly or more practically. He 
brought scholars from different parts of the world. He 
aet up schools in his monasteries " where every free-born 
youth, who has the means, shall attend to his book till 
he can read English writing perfectly." He presided 
over a school in his own court. He made himself a 



28 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

master of a literary English style, and he did this that 
he might teach his people. He translated the popular 
manuals of the time into English, but he edited them 
with large additions of his own, needful as he thought, 
for English use. He gave his nation moral philosophy 
in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy ; a universal his- 
tory, with geographical chapters of his own, "of the 
highest literary and philological value as specimens of his 
natural prose," in his translation of Orosiiis ; an ecclesi- 
astical history of England in Baeda's History, giving to 
some details a West-Saxon form ; and a religious hand- 
book, with a preface of his own, in the Pastoral Rule of 
Pope Gregory, He induced Bishop Werferth to translate 
into English the Dialogues of Gregory, a book which had 
a far-reaching influence on mediaeval literature and the- 
ology. We do not quite know whether he worked him- 
self at the English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but at 
least it was in his reign that this chronicle rose out of 
meagre lists into a full narrative of events. To him, 
then, we English look back as the fountain of English 
prose literature. 

2 1 . The Later Old English Prose. — The impulse he 
gave soon died away, but it was revived under King Ead- 
gar the Peaceful, whose seventeen years of government 
(958-75) were the most prosperous and glorious of the 
West-Saxon Empire. Under him and his predecessors, 
^thelwold, Bishop of Winchester, founded and kept up 
English schools, and, working together with Archbishop 
Dunstan and Oswald of Worcester, recreated monastic 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 29 

life, classic learning, and the education of the clergy. 
Their labours were the origin of the famous Blickling 
Homilies, 971. About twenty years after, /Elfric, called 
" Grammaticus " from his Englished Latin Grammar, 
began to write. He turned into English the Pentateuch, 
Joshua, and part of Job. The rest of his numerous 
works are some of the best models we possess of the 
literary English of the beginning of the eleventh century. 
The two collections of Homilies we owe to him, and 
his Lives of the Saints, are written in a classic prose, 
and his Glossary and Colloquy, afterwards edited by 
vElfric Bata, served for a kind of Enghsh- Latin text- 
book. His prose in his later life was somewhat spoiled 
by his over- mastering fancy for alliteration, but he is 
always a clear and forcible writer of English. But this 
revival had no sooner begun to take root than the North- 
men came again in force upon the land and conquered it. 
We have in Wulfstan's (Archbishop of York, 1002-23) 
Address to the English, a terrible picture, written in im- 
passioned prose, of the demoralisation caused by the in- 
roads of the Danes. During the fresh interweaving of 
Danes and Enghsh together under Danish kings from 
1013 to 1042, no English literature arose, but Latin prose 
intruded more and more on English writing. It was 
towards the reign of Edward the Confessor that English 
writing again began to live. But no sooner was it born 
than the Norman invasion repressed, but did not quench 
its hfe. 

22. The English Chronicle, — One great monument, 



30 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

however, of Old English prose lasts beyond the Conquest. 
It is the English Chronicle, and in it our hterature is 
continuous from Alfred to Stephen. At first it was 
nothing but a record of the births and deaths of bishops 
and kings, and was probably a West-Saxon Chronicle. 
Among these short notices there is, however, one tragic 
story, of Cynewulf and Cyneheard, under the date 755 
— =but the true date is 784 — so rude in style, and so cir- 
cumstantial, that it is probably contemporary with the 
events themselves. If so, it is the oldest piece of histori- 
cal prose in any Teutonic tongue. More than a hundred 
years later Alfred took up the Chronicle, caused it to 
be edited from various sources, added largely to it from 
Baeda, and raised it to the dignity of a national his- 
tory. The narrative of Alfred's wars with the Danes, 
written, it is likely, by himself at the end of his reign, 
enables us to estimate the great weight Alfred himself 
had in hterature. " Compared with this passage," says 
Professor Earle, " every other piece of prose, not in these 
Chronicles merely, but throughout the whole range of ex- 
tant Saxon literature, must assume a secondary rank." 
After Alfred's reign, and that of his son Eadward, 901-25, 
the Chronicle becomes scanty, but songs and odes are in- 
serted in it. In the reign of ^thelred and during the 
Danish kings its fulness returns, and growing by additions 
from various quarters, it continues to be our great contem- 
porary authority in English history till 1154, when it 
abruptly closes with the death of Stephen. *' It is the first 
history of any Teutonic people in their own language ; it 



T EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 3 1 

is the earliest and most venerable monument of English 
prose." In it Old English poetry sang its last extant 
song, in its death Old English prose dies. It is not till 
the reign of John that English poetry, in any form but 
that of short poems, appears again in the Brut of Laya- 
mon. It is not till the reign of Henry III. that original 
English prose begins again in the Ancren Riwle (the 
Rule of Anchoresses), in the Wooing of our Lord, and in 
the charming homily entitled the Sawles Warde, 



32 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 



CHAPTER n 

FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, TO66-I4OO 

23. General Outline. — The invasion of Britain by the 
Enghsh made the island, its speech, and its literature, 
English. The invasion of England by the Danes left our 
speech and literature still English. The Danes were of 
our stock and tongue, and we absorbed them. The in- 
vasion of England by the Normans seemed likely to crush 
the English people, to root out their Hterature, and even 
to threaten their speech. But that which happened to 
the Danes happened to the Normans also, and for the 
same reason. They were originally of like blood to the 
English, and of like speech ; and though during their 
settlement in Normandy they had become French in 
manner and language, and their literature French, yet 
the old blood prevailed in the end. The Norman felt 
his kindred with the English tongue and spirit, became 
an Englishman, and left the French tongue that he might 
speak and write in English. We absorbed the Normans, 
and we took into our literature and speech the French 
elements they had brought with them. It was a process 
slower in literature than it was in the political history^ 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 33 

but it began from the political struggle. Up to the time 
of Henry II. the Norman troubled himself but little about 
the Enghsh tongue. But when French foreigners came 
pouring into the land in the train of Henry and his sons 
the Norman allied himself with the Englishman against 
these foreigners, and the English tongue began to rise into 
importance. Its Hterature grew slowly, but as quickly 
as most of the literatures of Europe. Moreover it never 
quite ceased. We are carried on to the year 1154 by the 
prose of the English Chronicle. There are traces in the 
Norman Chroniclers of the use they made of lost Eng- 
lish war-songs. There are Old English homilies which 
fve may date from 11 20. The so-called Moi-al Ode, an 
English rhyming poem, was compiled about the year 11 70. 
[t made almost a school ; it gave rise to some impassioned 
poems to the Virgin, and it is found in a volume of hom- 
iUes of the same date. In the reign of Henry IL, the 
old Southern-English Gospels of King ^thelred's time 
were modernised after 200 years or less of use. The 
Sayings of Alfred, written in English for the Enghsh, 
were composed about the year 1200. About the same 
date the Old English Charters of Bury St. Edmunds were 
translated into the dialect of the shire, and now, early in 
the thirteenth century, at the central time of the strife 
between English and foreign elements, after the death of 
Richard I., the Brut of Layamon and the Orrmulum 
come forth within ten years of each other to prove the 
continuity, tHe survival, and the victory of the English 
tongue. When the patriotic struggle closed in the reign 



34 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

of Edward I., English literature had again risen, through 
the song, the religious poems, the alliterative romance 
and homily, the lives of saints and the translations of 
French romances, into importance, and was written by a 
people made up of Norman and Englishman welded into 
one by the fight against the French foreigner. But 
though the foreigner was driven out, his literature influ- 
enced, and continued to influence, the new English 
poetry, for in this revival our literature was chiefly poet- 
ical. Prose, with but few exceptions, was still written 
in Latin. 

24. Religious and Story-telling Poetry are the two 
main streams into which this poetical literature divides 
itself. The religious poetry is for the most part English 
in spirit, and a poetry of the people, from the Orrmu- 
luniy about 12 15, to Piers Plowman, in which poem the 
distinctly English poetry reached its truest expression in 
1362. The story-telling poetry may be called English at 
its beginning in the Brut of Layamon, but becomes more 
and more influenced by the romantic poetry of France, 
and in the end grows in Chaucer's hands into a poetry 
of the court and of fine allegory, a literary in contrast 
with a popular poetry. But Chaucer, at first thus influ- 
enced by French and then by Itahan subjects, becomes 
at last entirely English in feeling and in subjects, and the 
Canterbury Tales are the best example of English story- 
telling we possess. The struggle then of England against 
the foreigner to become and remain England finds its 
parallel in the struggle of English poetry against the 



n FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 35 

influence of foreign poetry to become and remain English. 
Both struggles were long and varied, but in both Eng- 
land was triumphant. She became a nation, and she won 
a national literature. It is the course of this struggle 
we have now to trace along the two lines already laid 
down — the poetry of religion and the poetry of story- 
teUing; but to do so we must begin in both instances 
with the Norman Conquest. 

25. The Religious Poetry. — The religious revival of 
the eleventh century was strongly felt in Normandy, and 
both the knights and Churchmen who came to England 
with William the Conqueror and during his son's reign, 
were founders of abbeys, from which, as centres of learn- 
ing and charity, the country was civihsed. Where Lan- 
franc and Anselm lived, religion or scholastic learning 
was not likely to go to sleep. A frequent communica- 
tion was kept up with French scholarship through the 
University of Paris. Schools and libraries multiplied. 
The Latin learning of England steadily developed. Its 
scholars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries wrote 
not only on theology, but on many various subjects ; 
and some of their books influenced the whole of Euro- 
pean thought. In Henry I.'s reign the rehgion of 
England was further quickened by missionary monks 
sent by Bernard of Clairvaux. London was stirred to 
rebuild St. Paul's, and abbeys rose in all the well- 
watered valleys of the north. Thus the English citi- 
zens of London and the English peasants in the country 
received a new religious life from the foreign noble and 



36 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the foreign monk, and both were drawn together through 
a common worship. When this took place a desire arose 
for religious handbooks in the English tongue. Orrmin's 
Orrmulum may be taken as a type of these. We may 
date it, though not precisely, at 12 15, the date of the 
Great Charter. It is English ; its sources are ^Ifric 
and Baeda ; its Danish writer loves his native dialect ; 
not five French words are to be found in it. It is a 
metrical version of the Gospel of each day with the 
addition of a sermon in verse. "This book is named 
Orrmulum for that Orrm it wrought." It marks the 
rise of English religious literature, and its religion is 
simple and rustic. Orrm's ideal monk is " a very pure 
man, and altogether without property, except that he 
shall be found in simple meat and clothes." He will 
have "a hard and stiff and rough and heavy life to 
lead. All his heart and desire ought to be aye tov/ard 
heaven, and to serve his Master well." This was Eng- 
Ksh religion in the country at this date. It was con- 
tinued in EngHsh prose writing by the Ancren Riwle — 
the Rule of the Anchoresses — written about 1220. The 
original MS. was probably in the Dorsetshire dialect. 
The Genesis and then the Exodus, biblical poems of 
about 1250, were made by the pious writers to make 
Christian men as glad as birds at the dawning for the 
story of salvation. A Northumbrian Psalter of 1250 
is only one example out of many devotional pieces, 
homilies, metrical creeds, hymns to the Virgin (mostly 
imitated from the French), which, with the metrical 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 3/ 

Lives of the Saints (a large volume, the lives translated 
from Latin or French prose into English verse), carry 
the religious poetry up to 1300. Among these the 
most important are the lives of three saints, Marherete, 
Juliane, and Katerine, and the homily on Hali Meiden- 
had (Holy Maidenhood) all in alHterative verse, written 
in southern England, and beginning a new and vital 
class of poetry, the poetry of impassioned love to 
Christ and the Virgin. 

26. Literature and the Friars.- — There was little 
rehgion in the towns, but this was soon changed. In 
1 22 1 the Mendicant Friars came to England, and they 
chose the towns for their work. The first Friars who 
learnt English that they might preach to the people 
were foreigners, and spoke French. Many English 
Friars studied in Paris, and came back to England, 
able to talk to Norman noble and English peasant. 
Their influence, exercised both on Norman and Eng- 
lish, was thus a mediatory and uniting one, and Normans 
as well as English now began to write religious works in 
English. The people, of course, had to be served with 
stories, and in the early years of the fourteenth century 
a number of Christian legends of the childhood of Jesus, 
of the Virgin, the Apostles and Saints, and of miracles, 
chiefly drawn from the French, were put into varying 
poetic forms ; and, recited everywhere, added a large 
number of materials to the imagination of England. A 
legend-cycle was thus formed, and this cycle was chiefly 
made by writers in the south of England, In 1303 



38 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Robert Mannyng of Brunne, in Lincolnshire, freely 
translated, to please plain people, a French work, the 
Manual of Sins (written thirty years earlier by William 
of Waddington), under the title of Handlyng Synne, 
WiUiam of Shoreham translated the whole of the Psalter 
into English prose about 1327, and wrote poems which 
might be called treatises in rhyme. The Cursor Mundi^ 
written about 1320, in Northumbria, and thought "the 
best book of all " by men of that time, was a metrical 
recast of the history of the Old and New Testament, 
interspersed, as was the Handlyng Synne, with legends 
of saints. This book started a whole series of verse- 
homilies tagged with tales, which created in northern 
England a legend-cycle similar to that created in the 
south. Some scattered Sermons, and in 1340 the 
Ayenbite of Inwyt (the Sting of Conscience), translated 
from the French, mark how English prose was rising 
through religion. About the same year Richard RoUe, 
the Hermit of Hampole, wrote in Latin and in Nor- 
thumbrian EngHsh for the "unlearned," a poem called 
the Pricke of Conscience. This poem is the last dis- 
tinctly religious poem of any importance before the 
Vision of Piers Plowman, unless we are led to except 
those written by the author of The Grene Knight. At 
its date, 1340, the religious influence of the Friars was 
swiftly decaying. In Piers Plowman their influence for 
good is gone. In that poem, which brings rehgious 
poetry, in the death of its author, up to 1400, the re- 
ligious literature of England strikes the last note of 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 39 

the old religious impulse and the boldest music of the 
new. The Friar is slain, the Puritan survives. 

27. History and the Story-telling Poetry. — The 
Normans brought an historical taste with them to 
England, and created a valuable historical literature. 
It was written in Latin, and we have nothing to do 
with it till English story-telling grew out of it about 
the time of the Great Charter. But it was in itself 
of such importance that a few things must be said 
concerning it. 

(i) The men who wrote it were called Chroniclers. 
At first they were only annalists — that is, they jotted 
down the events of year after year without any attempt 
to bind them together into a connected whole. Of these, 
the most important, and indeed they were something 
more than mere annalists, were Ordericus Vitalis, and 
his predecessors, Florence of Worcester and Simeon of 
Durham. But afterwards, from the time of Henry I., 
another class of men arose, who wrote, not in scattered 
monasteries, but at the Court. Living at the centre of 
political life, their histories were written in a philosophic 
spirit, and wove into a whole the growth of law and 
national life and the story of affairs abroad. They are 
our great authorities for the history of these times. They 
begin with William of Malmesbury, whose book ends in 
1142, and die out after Matthew Paris, 1235-73. His- 
torical prose in England is only represented after the 
death of Henry HL by a few dry Latin annalists till it 
rose again in modern EngHsh prose in 15 13, when Sir 



40 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Thomas More's Life of Edward V. and Usurpation oj 
Richard III. is said to have been written. 

(2) A distinct English feeli^ig soon sprang up among 
these Norman historians. English patriotism was far 
from having died among the Enghsh themselves. The 
Sayings of /Elf red were written in English by the English. 
These and some ballads, as well as the early English 
war-songs, interested the Norman historians and were 
collected by them. William of Malmesbury, who was 
born of English and Norman parents, has sympathies 
with both peoples, and his history marks how both were 
becoming one nation. The same welding together of 
the conquered and the conquerors is seen in Henry of 
Huntingdon and others, till we come to Matthew Paris, 
whose view of history is entirely that of an Englishman. 
When he wrote, Norman noble and English yeoman, 
Norman abbot and English priest, were, and are in his 
pages, one in blood and one in interests. 

28. English Story-telling grew out of this historical 
hterature. There was a Welsh priest at the court of 
Henry I., called Geoffrey of Monmouth, who, inspired 
by the Genius of romance, composed in Latin twelve 
short books (1132-35), which he playfully called History. 
He had been given, he said, an ancient Welsh book to 
translate which told in verse the history of Britain from 
the days when Brut, the great-grandson of ^Eneas, landed 
on its shores, through the whole history of King Arthur 
down to Cadwallo, a Welsh king who died in 689. The 
real historians were angry at the fiction, and declared 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 4I 

that throughout the whole of it " he had lied saucily and 
shamelessly." It was indeed only a clever putting to- 
gether and invention of a number of Welsh and other 
legends, but it was the beginning of story-telling after the 
Conquest. Every one who read it was delighted with it ; 
it made, as we should say, a sensation, and as much on 
the Continent as in England. Geoffrey may be said to 
have created the heroic figure of Arthur, which had been 
only sketched in the compilation which passes under the 
name of Nennius. In it the Welsh invaded Enghsh hter- 
ature, and their tales have never since ceased to live in 
it. They charm us as much in Tennyson's Idylls of the 
King as they charmed us in the days of Henry I. But the 
stories Geoffrey of Monmouth told were in Latin prose. 
They were put first into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar 
for the wife of his patron, Ralph FitzGilbert, a northern 
baron. They got afterwards to France and, added to 
from Breton legends, were made into a poem and decked 
out with the ornaments of French romance. In that 
form they came back to England as the work of Wace, a 
Norman of Caen, the writer also of the Roman de Ron, 
who called his poem the Geste des Bretons (afterwards 
the Brut), and completed it in 1155, shortly after the 
accession of Henry II. Spread far and wide in France, 
it led to an immense development there and elsewhere 
of the Legend of Arthur and his Knights. 

29. Layamon's '*Brut." — In this French form the 
story drifted through England, and at last faUing into the 
hands of an English priest in Worcestershire, he resolved 



42 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

to tell it in alliterative English verse to his countrymen, 
and so doing became the writer of our first important 
English poem after the Conquest. We may roughly say 
that its date is 1205, ten years or so before the Orrniu- 
lum was written, ten years before the Great Charter. It 
is plain that its composition, though it told a Welsh story, 
was looked on as a patriotic work by the writer. " There 
was a priest in the land," he writes of himself, " whose 
name was Layamon ; he was son of Leovenath : May 
the Lord be gracious unto him ! He dwelt at Earnley, 
a noble church on the bank of Severn, near Radstone, 
where he read books. It came in mind to him and in 
his chiefest thought that he would tell the noble needs 
of England, what the men were named, and whence they 
came, who first had English land." And it was truly of 
great importance. The poem opened to the imagination 
of the English people an immense, though a fabled, past 
for the history of the island they dwelt in, and made a 
common bond of interest between Norman and English- 
man. It linked also the Welsh to the English and the 
Norman. Written on the borders of Wales, it introduces 
a number of Briton legends of which Wace knew nothing, 
and of English stories also down to the days of ^thel- 
stan. It enlarged Arthur before the eyes of men, and 
even Teutonic sagas enter into the story. In the realm 
of poetry all nations meet and are reconciled. Though 
a great deal of it is rendered from the French, there are 
not fifty French words in its 30,000 lines. The old Eng- 
lish alliterative metre is kept up with a few rare rhymes. 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 43 

In battle, in pathetic story, in romantic adventure, in in- 
vention, in the sympathy of sea and storm with heroic 
deeds, he is a greater and more original poet than those 
who followed him, till we come to Chaucer. He touches 
with one hand the ancient England before the Conquest, 
he touches with another the romantic poetry after it. In- 
deed, what Caedmon was to early English poetry, Layamon 
is to EngHsh poetry after the Conquest. He is the first 
of the new singers. 

30. Story-telling becomes entirely French in Form. — 
After an interval the desire for story-telling increased in 
England, and France satisfied the desire. The French 
tales were carried over our land by the travelling mer- 
chant and friar, by the gleemen and singers who trans- 
lated them, or sung translations of them, not only to the 
castle and the farm, but to the village and the town. 
Floriz and Blancheflur and the Romance of Sir T?'istrem 
were versified before 1300, and many other romantic 
tales. The lay of Havelok the Dane was perhaps adapted 
from the French towards the close of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, and so was the song of King Horn. Their English 
origin is also maintained, and at least both rest on Teutonic 
tradition. The first took form in northern England, and 
shares in the rough vigour of the north. The second is a 
southern tale, and has been entirely transformed by the 
romantic spirit. English in rhythm, it is thoroughly 
French in feeling. The romances of King Alexander and 
of Richard Coeur de Lion, and of Arthour and Meidin, 
while romantic in form, preserve an English sentiment 



44 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and originality which make us remember that, when they 
were written, Edward I. was making Norman and EngHsh 
into one people. About 1300 the story-teUing verged 
into historical poems, and Robert of Gloucester wrote 
his Rhyming Chronicle, from Brutus to Edward I. As the 
dates grow nearer to 1300, the amount of French words 
increases, and the P'rench romantic manner of story-telling. 
In the Romance of Alexander, to take one example as a 
type of all, the natural landscape, the conventional intro- 
ductions to the parts, the gorgeous descriptions of pomps, 
and armour, and cities, the magic wonders, the manners, 
and feasts, and battles of chivalry, especially the love 
affairs and feelings, are all steeped in the colours of 
French romantic poetry. Now this romance was origi- 
nally adapted by a Frenchman about the year 1200. It 
took therefore nearly a century before the French 
romantic manner of poetry could be naturalised in 
EngHsh ; and it was naturalised, curious to say, at the 
very time when England as a nation had lost its French 
attachments and become entirely English. 

31. Cycles of Romance. — At this time, then, the 
French romance of a hundred years earlier was made 
English in England. There were four great romantic 
stories. The first was that of King Ai'thur, and Geoffrey 
of Monmouth began it in England about 1132. Before 
1 150 it was taken up in Normandy, sent therefrom into 
France, and independent invention soon began to play 
upon it. Of these inventors the first was Crestien of 
Troyes, but we owe to Robert de Boron, a knight of the 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 45 

Vosges country, the first poem on the Graal, the Holy 
Dish with which Christ celebrated the Last Supper, and 
which in the hands of Joseph of Arimathea received 
his blood. The origin of the legend may be traced to 
Celtic stories, and this may partly account for its 
swift development in the west of England. Two more 
romances on the subject, Le Gi^and St. Graal and La 
Quesie del St. Graal, in which Galahad appears, are 
attributed to Walter Map, a friend of Henry II., and 
they were certainly written in England in that king's 
reign. It is due to the Anglo-Normans and the Normans 
that this Graal-story, in which the Arthur legends were 
bound up with the highest doctrine of the Church, took 
its great development, not only in France but in Ger- 
many. Alongside of the Arthurian Saga arose the 
Tristan story, and, at first independent, it was afterwards 
linked on to the tale of Arthur. These two together, 
along with stories invented concerning all the Knights of 
the Round Table, and chiefly Launcelot and Gawaine, 
were worked over in a multitude of romandc tales, most 
of which became popular in England, and were sung and 
made into English verse from the thirteenth to the 
sixteenth century. 

The second romantic story was that of Charlemagne 
and his twelve peers. Begun in France with the Song of 
Roland, a huge tale of Charlemagne was forged about 
mo in the name of Archbishop Turpin. In this, 
Charlemagne's wars were bound up with oriental legend, 
with the Holy Sepulchre, with every kind of story. A 



46 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

great number of Carlovingian romances followed. This 
cycle, however, owing perhaps to the aHenation of the 
Anglo-Normans in England from the French, was not 
much developed in England at the beginning of our 
romance-writing. The most popular of the Carlovingian 
poems was the poem of Otinel in the reign of Edward 
II. ; but the most beautiful was Amis et Amiloun, the 
English version of which so wholly leaves out its con- 
nexion with Charlemagne that it has been supposed to be 
an original Anglo-Norman-English poem. The Roland^ 
the Charlemagne and Roland, a Siege of Milan^ Sir 
Ferumbras and the humorous Rauf Coilyear almost 
exhaust the English poems of this cycle. 

The third Romantic story is that of the Life of 
Alexander, derived from a Latin version (fourth century) 
of the Greek story made in Alexandria under the name 
of Callisthenes, Its romantic wonders, fictions, and 
magic, largely added to from the Arabian books about 
Eskander, were doubled by the imagination and coloured 
with all the romance of chivalry in the eleventh or twelfth 
century ; and the story became so common in England 
that " every wight that hath discrecioune," says Chaucer, 
had heard of Alexander's fortune. No doubt it- was sung 
all over England, but we have only a few poems concern- 
ing it in English, the last of which, a free translation of 
a French original, The Buik of the most noble and vail- 
zeand Conquerour, belongs to the fourth decade of the 
fifteenth century. 

The fourth romantic story, first in date, but last in im- 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 4/ 

portance in England, was that of the Siege of Troy. Two 
Latin pieces, bearing the names of Dares Phrygius and 
of Dictys Cretensis, composed about the story of Troy 
in the decline of Latin literature, were worked over by 
Benoit de Sainte More, with fabulous and romantic in- 
ventions of his own, in the Roman de Troie, about 1160. 
Guido della Colonne, of Messina, took them up about 
1270, and with additions woven into them from the 
Theban and Argonautic stories, made a great Latin story 
out of them which Lydgate used. Virgil supplied mate- 
rials for a romance of ^neas ; Statins for a Roman de 
Thebes. During the crusades Byzantine and oriental 
stories entered into French romance, and especially into 
this Cycle of Troy. The Gest Historiale (XIV. Cent.) 
of the Destruction of Troy, first introduced the story of 
Troilus (invented by Benoit) to readers of English verse. 
This cycle does not seem to have much entered into our 
literature till Chaucer's time, but it attracted both Chau- 
cer and Lydgate. 

These were the four great Romantic cycles which were 
used by English poets. But the desire for romances 
was not satisfied with these. A few collected round Old 
English traditions or history. There was a poem about 
Wade, the father of Weland, to which Chaucer alludes. 
It has long been lost, but a small fragment of it has lately 
been discovered. I have already mentioned the stories 
of Horn and Havelok. The romances of Guy of War- 
wick and of Bevis of Hampton, though both translated 
from the French, take us back to the time of ^thelstan 



48 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and Eadgar, but are as unhistorical as the tales of Troy 
and Alexander. A number of other romances from vari- 
ous sources belong to the time of the Edwards, and were 
all derived from the French. Short tales also sprang up, 
taken from the fabliaux, from the Roman de Renart, 
from the French lais, some satirical, some of love, some 
in the form of "debates." Compilations of tales were 
made. The Sevyn Sages was worked from the oriental 
stock of i\\Q Book of the Seven Wise Men; and the Gesta 
Romanorwfi, a book of stories which began to be used 
in England in the reign of Edward L, supplied the mate- 
rial for tales in England as well as all over Europe. The 
country was therefore swarming with tales, chiefly French, 
and its poetic imagination with the fancies, the fables, 
the love, and the ornaments of French romance, trans- 
lated and imitated in English, and written in the metres 
of France and in rhyme. 

32. Alliterative English Poems, 1350. — In the midst 
of all this French imitation, something national begins 
to gleam, and it comes from the west, from the lands on 
the edge of Wales and Cumbria. This is the recovery 
of the Old English metre, that fine, elastic, marching, 
epic, alliterative metre which Layamon used, and which 
takes us back to Cynewulf. The things written now in 
this national metre are still romantic and French in sub- 
ject, feeling, and manners ; but their Teutonic metre 
slides a fresh, even a vigorous originality, into the con- 
ventional phrasing of the romantic poetry. This reaction 
from a French to an English type began in the middle 



a FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 49 

of the fourteenth century, and runs parallel with the gen- 
eral victory of the English language over the French in 
the time of Edward III. At least twelve important 
poems are written in this alHterative metre, the last of 
which in this century was Langland's Vision. Among 
these, but not altogether alliterative, are the poems of a 
northern, perhaps a Lancashire poet. These are Sir 
Gawayne and the Gi^ene Knight ; Pearl ; and Cleaji- 
ness and Patience (Clannesse and Pacience). This poet, 
who probably had finished his poems just as Chaucer and 
Langland began to write, stands quite apart from his fel- 
lows in excellence, and, indeed, along with Langland and 
only below Chaucer. Though Sir Gawayne is romantic, 
it escapes at many points from the French spirit. It is 
more original, it is more imaginative, it is far more in- 
tense in feeling, than the ordinary romances. It de- 
scribes natural scenery at first hand, and the scenery is 
that of the poet's own country. It is moral in aim, it is 
composed into an organic whole. It is full of new inven- 
tions. In the Pearl, our earliest In Memoiiam, there is 
an extraordinary personal passion of grief and of religious 
exultation pervading a lovely symbolism, which is quite 
unique. The same strong personality, mixed with a 
more distinctly moral purpose, fills the writer's two other 
poems, and brings him as a religious poet into range 
with Langland on the one hand, and with Cynewulf 
on the other. No one can crudely mix him up with 
France. He is as English, at the last, as Langland or 
Chaucer. 



50 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

33. English Lyrics. — In the midst of all this story- 
telKng, like prophecies of what should afterwards be so 
lovely in our poetry, rose, no one can tell how, some 
lyric poems, country idylls, love songs, and, later on, 
some war-songs. The Enghsh ballad, sung from town 
to town by wandering gleemen, had never altogether 
died. A number of rude ballads collected round the 
legendary Robin Hood, and the kind of poetic litera- 
ture which sang of the outlaw and the forest, and after- 
wards so fully of the wild border Hfe, gradually took 
form. About 1280 a beautiful little idyll called the 
Oivl and the Nightingale was written, probably in Dor- 
setshire, in which the rival birds submit their quarrel for 
precedence to the possible writer of the poem, Nicholas 
of Guildford. About 1300 we meet with a few lyric 
poems, full of charm. They sing of spring-time with its 
blossoms, of the woods ringing with the thrush and night- 
ingale, of the flowers and the seemly sun, of country 
work, of the woes and joys of love, and many other 
delightful things. They are tinged with the colour of 
French romance, but they have an English background. 
This lyrical movement began with hymns to the Virgin 
and Christ, touched with the sentiments of Latin and 
Norman- French amorous poetry. These changed into 
frank love-poems in the hands of the wandering stu- 
dents. Many arose on the Welsh marches, and were 
tinged with Celtic feeling. Some are no doubt literary 
renderings of English folk-songs, such as " Surner is 
ycumen in," "Blow, northerne wind," and are full of 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 5 1 

love of women and love of nature. After these, a new 
type of religious lyrics blossomed, in which, as in all 
future Enghsh poetry, the love of nature was mingled 
with the love of God and the longing of the soul for 
perfect beauty. Satirical lyrics also arose, and the pro- 
verbial poetry of France gave an impulse to collections 
like the Proverbs of Hendyng. Most of these were of 
the time of Henry III. and Edward I. Political ballads 
now began, in Edward I.'s reign, to be frequendy written 
in Enghsh, but the only dateable ballads of importance 
are that on the battle of Lewes, 1264, and the ten war 
lyrics of Laurence Minot, who, in 1352, sang the great 
deeds and battles of Edward IIL 

34. The King's English. — After the Conquest, French 
or Latin was the language of the literary class. The Eng- 
hsh tongue, spoken only by the people, fell back from the 
standard West-Saxon Enghsh of the Chronicle into that 
broken state of anarchy in which each part of the country 
has its own dialect, and each writer uses the dialect of 
his own dwelling-place. All the poems then of which we 
have spoken were written in dialects of English, not in a 
fixed English common to all writers. During the prev- 
alence of French, and the continued translation of 
French poems, English had been invaded by French 
words, and though it had become, in Edward III.'s 
reign, the national tongue, it had been transformed as a 
language. The old inflections had mostly disappeared. 
French endings and prefixes were used, till even so early 
as the end of Edward L's reign, in Robert of Brunne's 



52 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

work, a third of his nouns, adverbs, and verbs, are 
French. His work was still however in a dialect — the 
East-Midland dialect. This dialect grew into the lan- 
guage of literature, the standard English. In Robert of 
Brunne, it was most literary and most French, but we 
riiust remember that the same dialect belonged to the 
two centres of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, and that 
London, on this side the Thames was contained in the 
same Anglian boundaries. This conquering dialect, when 
it became the standard Enghsh, did not prevent the 
Vision concerning Piers Plowman and Wyclif's transla- 
tion of the Bible from being written in a dialect, but it 
became the English in which all future English literature 
was to be written. It was fixed into clear form by 
Chaucer. It was the language talked at the court and 
in the court society to which that poet belonged. It was 
the King's English, and the fact that it was the tongue 
of the best and most cultivated society, as well as the 
great excellence of the works written in it by Chaucer, 
made it at once the tongue of Hterature. 

35. Religious Literature in Langland and Wyclif. — 
We have traced the work of " transition English," as it 
has been called, along the hnes of popular religion and 
story-telling. The first of these, in the realm of poetry, 
reaches its goal in the work of William Langland ; in the 
realm of prose it reaches its goal in Wyclif. In both 
these writers, the work differs from any that went before 
it, by its popular power, and by the depth of its re- 
ligious feeling. It is plain that it represented a society 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 53 

much more strongly moved by religion than that of 
the beginning of the fourteenth century. In Wyclif, the 
voice comes from the university and it went all over the 
land in the body of preachers whom, hke Wesley, he sent 
forth. In Langland's Vision we have a voice from the 
centre of the people themselves ; his poem is written 
in old alHterative English verse, and in the Old EngHsh 
manner. The very ploughboy could understand it. It 
became the book of those who desired social and Church 
reform. It was as eagerly listened to by the free labourers 
and fugitive serfs who collected round John Ball and Wat 
Tyler. It embodied a puritan reaction against the Friars 
who had fallen away from the religious revival they had 
so nobly instituted. The strongest cry of this regenerated 
rehgion was for truth as against hypocrisy, for purity in 
State and Church and private life, for honest labour, and 
against ill-gotten wealth and its tyrannical persecution. 
There was also a great movement at this time against the 
class system of the Middle Ages. This was made a re- 
ligious movement when the equality of all men before 
God was maintained, and a social movement when it pro- 
tested against the oppression of the poor and on behalf 
of their misery. The French wars had increased this 
misery. Heavy taxation and severe laws ground down the 
peasantry. The " Black Death " deepened the wretched- 
ness into panic. In 1349, 1362, and 1369 it swept over 
England. Grass grew in the towns ; whole villages were 
-eft uninhabited; a wild terror fell upon the people, 
which was added to by a fierce tempest in 1362 that to 



54 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

men's minds told of the wrath of God. In their panic 
then, as well as in their pain, they fled to religion. 

36. Piers Plowman. — All these eleme^ are to be 
found fully represented in the Vision of William concern- 
ing Piers Plowman, followed by that concerning Vowel, 
Do bet, and Do best Its author, William Langland, 
though we are not certain of his surname, was born, about 
1332, at Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire. His Vision 
begins with a description of his sleeping on the Malvern 
Hills, and the first text of it was probably written in the 
country in 1362, At the accession of Richard IL, 1377, 
he was in London. The great popularity of his poem 
made him in that year, and again about the year 1398, 
send forth two more texts of his poem. In these texts 
he made so many additions to the first text that he nearly 
doubled the length of the original poem. In 1399, he 
wrote his last poem, Richard the Pedeless, and then died, 
probably in 1400, and we may hope in the quiet of the 
West country. 

37. His Vision. — He paints his portrait as he was 
when he lived in Cornhill, a tall, gaunt figure, whom men 
called Long Will ; clothed in the black robes in which he 
sang for a few pence at the funerals of the rich ; hating 
to take his cap off his shaven head to bow to the lords 
and ladies that rode by in silver and furs as he stalked 
in observant moodiness along the Strand. It is this 
figure which in indignant sorrow walks through the 
whole poem. The dream of the " field full of folk," 
with which it begins, brings together nearly as many 



n FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 55 

typical characters as the Tales of Chaucer do. In the 
first part, tht truth sought for is righteous deahng in 
Church, and^avv, and State. After the Prologue of the 
" field full of folk " and in it the Tower of Truth and the 
Dungeon where the Father of Falsehood lives, the Vision 
treats of Holy Church who tells the dreamer of Truth. 
Where is Falsehood ? he asks. She bids him turn, and 
he sees Falsehood and Lady Meed, and learns that 
they are to be married. Theology interferes and all the 
parties go to. London before the King. Laay Meed, 
arraigned on Falsehood's flight, is advised by the King 
to marry Conscience, but Conscience indignantly pro- 
claims her faults, and prophesies that one day Reason 
will judge the world. On this the King sends for Reason, 
who, deciding a question against Wrong and in spite of 
Meed (or bribery), is begged by the King to remain 
with him. This fills four divisions or "Passus." The 
fifth Passus contains the confession of the Seven Deadly 
Sins, and is full of vivid pictures of friars, robbers, nuns, 
of village life, of London alehouses, of all the vices of the 
time. It ends with the search for Truth being taken up 
by all the penitents, and then for the first time Piers 
Plowman appears and describes the way. He sets all 
who come to him to hard work, and it is here that the 
passages occur in which the labouring poor and their evils 
are dwelt upon. The seventh Passus introduces the bull 
of pardon sent by Truth (God the Father) to Piers. A 
Priest declares it is not vaHd, and the discussion between 
him and Piers is so hot that the Dreamer awakes and 



56 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

ends with a fine outburst on the wretchedness of a trust 
in indulgences and the nobleness of a righteous life. 
This is the first part of the poem. 

In the second part the truth sought for is that of 
righteous life, to Do Well, to Do Better, to Do Best, the 
three titles of a new vision and a new pilgrimage. In a 
series of dreams and a highly- wrought allegory, Do Well, 
Do Bet, and Do Best are finally identified with Jesus 
Christ, who now appears as Love in the dress of Piers 
Plowman. Do Well is full of curious and important 
passages. Do Bet points out Christ as the Saviour of the 
World, describes His death, resurrection, and victory over 
Death and Sin. And the dreamer awakes in a transport 
of joy, with the Easter chimes pealing in his ears. But 
as Langland looked round on the world, the victory did 
not seem real, and the stern dreamer passed out of 
triumph into the dark sorrow in which he Hved. He 
dreams again in Do Best, and sees, as Christ leaves the 
earth, the reign of Antichrist. Evils attack the Church 
and mankind. Envy, Pride, and Sloth, hefced by the 
Friars, besiege Conscience. Conscience crieW on Contri- 
tion to help him, but Contrition is asleep, and Conscience, 
all but despairing, grasps his pilgrim staff and sets out to 
wander over the world, praying for luck and health, " till 
he have Piers the Plowman," till he find the Saviour. 
And then the dreamer wakes for the last time, weeping 
bitterly. This is the poem which displays to us that side 
of English society which Chaucer had not touched, and 
which wrought so strongly in men's minds that its moral 



11 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 57 

influence was almost as widely spread as Wyclif s in the 
revolt which had now begun against Latin Christianity. 
Its fame was so great, that it produced imitators. About 
1394, another alliterative poem was set forth by an 
unknown author, with the title of Pierce the Ploughman'' s 
Crede ; and the Plowman's Tale, wrongly attributed to 
Chaucer, is another witness to the popularity of Langland. 
38. Wyclif. — At the same time as the Vision was 
being read all over England, John Wyclif, about 1378, 
determined to give a full translation of the Bible to the 
English people in their own tongue. He himself trans- 
lated the New Testament. His assistant, Nicholas of 
Hereford, finished the Old Testament as far as Baruch, 
and Wyclif completed it. Some time after, John Purvey, 
under Wyclif, revised the whole, corrected its errors, 
did away with its Latinisms, and made it a book of 
sterling Enghsh — a book which had naturally a great 
power to fix and preserve words in our language. But 
Wychf did much more than this for our tongue. He 
made it the popular language of religious thought 
and feeling. In 1381 he was in full battle with the 
Church on the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was 
condemned to silence. He repHed by appealing to the 
whole of England in the speech of the people. He sent 
forth tract after tract, sermon after sermon, couched not 
in the dry, philosophic style of the schoolmen, but in 
short, sharp, stinging sentences, full of the homely words 
used in his own Bible, denying one by one almost all the 
doctrines, and denouncing the practices, of the Church of 



58 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 

Rome. He was our first Protestant. It was a new 
literary vein to open, the vein of the pamphleteer. With 
his work then, and with Langland's, we bring up to the 
year 1400 the English prose and poetry pertaining to 
religion, the course of which we have been tracing since 
the Conquest. 

39. Story-telling is the other Hne on which we have 
placed our Hterature, and it is now represented by John 
GowER. He belongs to a school older than Chaucer, 
inasmuch as he is scarcely touched by the Italian, but 
chiefly by the French influence. However, he had read 
Petrarca. Fifty Balades prove with what clumsy ease he 
could write in the French tongue about the affairs of love. 
As he grew older he grew graver, and partly as the 
religious and social reformer, and partly as the story- 
teller, he fills up the literary space between the spirit 
of Langland and Chaucer. In the church of St. Sav- 
iour, at Southwark, his head is still seen resting on his 
three great works, the Speculum Meditantis, the Vox 
Clamaniis, the Confessio Amantis, 1393. It marks the 
unsettled state of our literary language, that each of 
these was written in a different tongue, the first in 
French, the second in Latin, the third in EngHsh. The 
first of these has been lost, but has lately been dis- 
covered at Cambridge. The second is a dream which 
passes into a sermon, cataloguing all the vices of the 
time, and is suggested by the peasant rising of 1381. 

The third, his English work, is a dialogue between a 
lover and his confessor a priest of Venus, and in its 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 59 

course, and with an imitation of Jean de Meung's part oi 
the Roman de la Rose, all the passions and studies which 
may hinder love are dwelt upon, partly in allegory, and 
their operation illustrated by apposite stories, borrowed 
from the Gesta Romanorum and from the Romances. 
But the book is in reality a better and larger collection 
of tales than was ever made before in English. The 
telling of the tales is wearisome, and the smoothness of 
the verse makes them more wearisome. But Gower was 
a careful writer of English ; and in his satire of evils, 
and in his grave reproof of the folHes of Richard II., 
he rises into his best strain. The king himself, even 
though reproved, was a patron of the poet. It was as 
Gower was rowing on the Thames that the royal barge 
drew near, and he was called to the king's side. " Book 
some new thing," said the king, " in the way you are used, 
into which book I myself may often look ; " and the re- 
quest was the origin of the Confession of a Lover. He 
ended by writing The Tripartite Chronicle. It is with 
pleasure that we turn from the learned man of talent 
to Geoffrey Chaucer — to the genius who called Gower, 
with perhaps some of the irony of an artist, " the moral 
Gower." 

40. Chaucer's French Period. — Geoffrey Chaucer 
was the son of John Chaucer, a vintner, of Thames 
Street, London, and was born in 1340 or a year or two 
earher. He lived almost all his Hfe in London, in the 
centre of its work and society. When he was sixteen he 
became page to the wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, 



60 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

and continued at the court till he joined the army in 
France in 1359. He was taken prisoner, but ransomed 
before the treaty of Bretigny, in 1360. We then know 
nothing of his Hfe for seven years ; but from items in the 
Exchequer Rolls, we find that he was again connected 
with the court, from 1366 to 1372. He was made a 
valet of the king's chamber, and in 1368 an "esquire 
of less degree." It was during this time that he began 
to write. We seem to have evidence that he composed 
in his wild youthful days a number of love poems, none 
of which have survived, but which gave him some fame 
as a poet. It is said that the A, B, C, a prayer to the 
Virgin, is the first of his extant poems, but some are in- 
clined to put it later. The translation of the Roman de 
la Rose which we possess is, with the exception of the 
first 1705 lines, denied to be his, but it is certain that, he 
did make a translation of the French poem ; and there 
are a few who think that Chaucer's translation was made 
about 1380, and that it is completely lost. It is com- 
monly said that he wrote the Compleynt unto Fife, a 
tender and lovely httle poem, before 1369. This was 
followed by the Boke of the Duchesse, in 1369, a pathetic 
allegory of the death of Blanche of Castile, whose hus- 
band, John of Gaunt, was Chaucer's . patron. These, 
being written under the influence of French poetry, are 
classed under the name of Chaucer's first period. There 
are fines in them which seem to speak of a luckless love 
affair, and in this broken love it has been supposed we 
find some key to Chaucer's early Ufe. However that 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 6l 

may be, he was married to Philippa Chaucer at some 
period between 1366 and 1374. Of the children of 
this marriage we only know certainly of one, Lewis, 
for whom he made his treatise on the Astrolabe. 

41. Chaucer's Italian Period. — Chaucer's second poetic 
period may be called the period of Italian influence, from 
1372 to 1384. During these years he went for the king 
on four, perhaps five, diplomatic missions. Two of these 
were to Italy — the first to Genoa, Pisa, and Florence, 
1372-3; the second to Lombardy, 1378-9. At that 
time the great Italian literature which inspired then, 
and still inspires, European literature, had reached an 
astonishing excellence, and it opened to Chaucer a 
new world of art. His many quotations from Dante 
show that he had read the Divina Commedia, and we 
may well think that he then first learnt the full power 
and range of poetry. He read the Sonnets of Petrarca, 
and he learnt what is meant by " form " in poetry ; but 
Petrarca never had the same power over him which 
Dante possessed. He read the tales and poems of 
Boccaccio, who made Italian prose, and in them he first 
saw how to tell a story exquisitely. Petrarca and Boc- 
caccio he may even have met, for they died in 1374 and 
1375, and Petrarca was in 1373 at Arqua, close to Padua, 
and employed on the Latin version of the story of Gri- 
silde, the version which Chaucer translated in the Clerk's 
tale. But Dante he could not see, for he had died at 
Ravenna in 132 1. When he came back from these 
journeys he was a new man. He threw aside the roraan- 



62 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

tic poetry much in vogue, and perhaps laughed at it then 
in his gay and kindly manner in the Rime of Sir Thopas^ 
one of the Canterbury Tales. His chief work of this 
time bears witness to the influence of Italy. It was 
Troilus and Criseyde^ 1380-3, a translation, with many 
changes and additions, of the Filostrato of Boccaccio. 
The additions (and he nearly doubled the poem) are 
stamped with his own pecuhar tenderness, vividness, and 
simplicity. His changes from the original are all tow- 
ards the side of purity, good taste, and piety. We 
meet the further influence of Boccaccio in the birth of 
some of the Canterbury Tales, and of Petrarca in the 
Tales themselves. To this time is now referred the Lyf 
of Seint Cecyle, afterwards made the Second Nun's tale ; 
and the passionate religious fervour and repentance of 
this poem has seemed to point to a period of penitence 
in his life for his early sensuousness. It did not last 
long, and he now wrote the Story of Grisilde, the Clerk's 
tale ; the Story of Constance^ the Man of Law's tale ; 
the Monk's tale; the Compleynt of Mars; the Com- 
pleynt to his Lady; Anelida and Arcyte ; Troilus and 
Criseyde ; the Lines to Adam Scrivener; To Rose- 
mounde ; The Parlement of Foules ; Boece, a prose ver- 
sion of the De Consolatione ; the Hous of Fame, and 
the Legende of Good Women. In these two last poems 
we may trace, not only an Itahan, but a classical period 
in the work of Chaucer. This is the record of the work 
of the years between 1373 and 1384 ; and almost all 
these poems are either influenced by Dante or adapted 



li FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCEli 6^ 

from Petrarca and Boccaccio. In the passion with which 
Chaucer describes the ruined love of Troilus or Anehda, 
some have traced the lingering sorrow of his early love 
affair. But if this be true, it was now passing away, for 
in the creation of Pandarus in the Troilus, and in the 
delightful fun of that enchanting poem the Pai'lement 
of Foules, a new Chaucer appears, the humorous poet 
of some of the Canterbury Tales. The noble art of the 
Farle7nentf as well as that of the Troilus, lifts Chaucer 
already on to that eminence apart where sit the great 
poets of the world. Nothing like this had appeared 
before in England. Nothing like it appeared again till 
Spenser. In the active business life he led during the 
period his poetry was likely to win a closer grasp on 
human life, for he was not only employed on service 
abroad, but also at home. In 1374 he was Comptroller 
of the Wool Customs, in 1382 of the Petty Customs, 
and in 1386 Knight of the Shire for Kent. 

42. Chaucer's English Period. — It is in the next 
period, from 1384 to 1390, that he left behind (except 
in the borrowing of his subjects) Italian influence as he 
had left French, and became entirely himself, entirely 
English. The comparative poverty in which he now 
lived, and the loss of his offices in 1386, for in John of 
Gaunt's absence court favour was withdrawn from him, 
and the death of his wife in 1387, may have given him 
more time for study and the retired life of a poet. His 
appointment as Clerk of the Works in 1389 brought him 
again into contact with men. He superintended the 



64 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAf 

repairs and building at the Palace of Westminster, the 
Tower, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, till July, 1391, 
when he was superseded, and Uved on pensions allotted 
to him by Richard II. and by Henry IV., after he had 
sent Henry in 1399 his Compkint to his Purse. Before 
1390, however, he had added to his great work its most 
English tales ; those of the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, 
the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Nun's 
Priest, the Pardoner, and perhaps the Sompnour. The 
Prologue was probably written in 1388. In these, in 
their humour, in their vividness of portraiture, in their 
ease of narration, and in the variety of their characters, 
Chaucer shines supreme. A few smaller poems belong 
to this time, such as the Former Age ; Fortune ; Truth ; 
Gentilesse ; and the Lak of Steadfastnesse. 

During the last ten years of his life, which may be 
called the period of his decay, he wrote some small 
poems, and along with the Compleynt of Venus, and a 
prose treatise on the Astrolabe, three more Canterbury 
tales, the Canon's-yeoman's, Manciple's, and Parson's. 
The last was written the year of his death, 1400. Having 
done this work he died in a house under the shadow 
of the Abbey of Westminster. Within the walls of the 
Abbey Church, the first of the poets who lies there, 
that " sacred and happy spirit " sleeps. 

43. Chaucer's Character. — Born of the tradesman class, 
Chaucer was in every sense of the word one of our finest 
gentlemen : tender, graceful in thought, glad of heart, 
humorous, and satirical without unkindness ; sensitive to 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 6$ 

every change of feeling in himself and others, and there- 
fore fall of sympathy ; brave in misfortune, even to mirth, 
and doing well and with careful honesty all he undertook. 
His first and great delight was in human nature, and he 
makes us love the noble characters in his poems, and feel 
with kindUness towards the baser and ruder sort. He 
never sneers, for he had a wide charity, and we can 
always smile in his pages at the follies and forgive the 
sins of men. He had a quiet and true religion, much 
like that we conceive Shakespeare to have had ; nor was 
he without a high philosophic strain. Both were kept in 
order by his imagination and his humour. He had a 
true and chivalrous regard for women of his own class, 
and his wife and he ought to have been very happy if 
they had fulfilled the ideal he had of marriage. He lived 
in aristocratic society, and yet he thought him the great- 
est gentleman who was the most courteous and the most 
virtuous. He lived frankly among men, and as we have 
seen, saw many different types of men, and in his own 
time filled many parts as a man of the world and of busi- 
ness. Yet, with all this active and observant fife, he was 
commonly very quiet and kept much to himself. " Flee 
from the press and dwell with steadfastness " is the first 
line of his last ballad, and it embodies, with the rest of 
that personal poem, the serious part of his hfe. The 
Host in the Tales japes at him for his lonely, abstracted 
air. ''Thou lookest as thou wouldest find a hare. And 
ever on the ground I see thee stare." Being a good 
scholar, he read morning and night alone, and he says 



66 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

that after his (office) work he would go home and sit at 
another book as dumb as a stone, till his look was dazed. 
While at study and when he was making of songs and 
ditties, "nothing else that God had made" had any in- 
terest for him. There was but one thing that roused him 
then, and that too he liked to enjoy alone. It was the 
beauty of the morning and the fields, the woods, and 
streams, and flowers, and the singing of the little birds. 
This made his heart full of revel and solace, and when 
spring came after winter, he rose with the lark and cried 
"Farewell, my book and my devotion." He was a keen 
observer of the nature he cared for, especially of colour. 
He loved the streams and the birds and soft grassy 
places and green trees, and all sweet, ordered gardens, 
and flowers. He could spend the whole day, he says, in 
gazing alone on the daisy, and though what he says is 
symbolic, yet we may trace through the phrase that 
lonely delight in natural scenery which is so special a 
mark of our later poets. He lived thus a double life, in 
and out of the world, but never a gloomy one. For he 
was fond of mirth and good-living, and when he grew 
towards age, was portly of waist, no poppet to embrace. 
But he kept to the end his elfish countenance, the shy, 
delicate, half- mischievous face which looked on men 
from its gray hair and forked beard, and was set off by 
his dark-coloured dress and hood. A knife and ink-horn 
hung on his dress ; we see a rosary in his hand ; and 
when he was alone he walked swiftly. 

44. The Canterbury Tales. — Of his work it is not 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 6/ 

easy to speak briefly, because of its great variety. Enough 
has been said of it, with the exception of his most com- 
plete creation, the Cante^-biiry Tales. It will be seen 
from the dates given above that they were not written at 
one time. They are not, and cannot be looked on as a 
whole. Many were wTitten independently, and then fitted 
into the framework of the Prologue. Many, which he 
intended to write in order to complete his scheme, were 
never written. But we may say that the full idea of his 
work took shape about 1385, after he had finished The 
Legende of Good Women, and that the whole existing 
body of the Tales was completed, with the exception of 
the last three already mentioned, before the close of 
1390. At intervals, from time to time, he added a tale ; 
in fact, the whole was done much in the same way as 
Tennyson has written his Idylls of the King. The manner 
in which he knitted them together was very simple, and 
likely to please the Enghsh people. The holiday ex- 
cursions of the time were the pilgrimages, and the most 
famous and the pleasantest pilgrimage to go, especially 
for Londoners, was the three or four days' journey to see 
the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. Persons of all 
ranks in life met and travelled together, starting from a 
London inn. Chaucer had probably made the pilgrimage 
to Canterbury in the spring of 1385 or 1387, and was led 
by this experience to the framework in which he set his 
pictures of life. He grouped around the jovial host of 
the Tabard Inn men and women of every class of society 
in England, set them on horseback to ride to Canterbuiy 



68 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and home again, intending to make each of them tel\ 
tales. No one could hit off a character better, and in 
his Prologue, and in the prologues to the several Tales, 
a great part of the new, vigorous Enghsh society which 
had grown up since Edward I. is painted with astonishing 
vividness. ^' I see all the pilgrims in the Canterbury 
Tales, '^ says Dryden, ".their humours, their features, and 
the very dress, as distinctly as if I had supped with them 
at the Tabard in Southwark." The Tales themselves 
take in the whole range of the poetry and the Hfe of the 
Middle Ages ; the legend of the saint, the romance of the 
knight, the wonderful fables of the traveller, the coarse 
tale of common life, the love story, the allegory, the 
animal-fable, and the satirical lay. And they are pure 
tales. He is not in any sense a dramatic writer ; he is 
our greatest story-teller in verse. All the best tales are 
told easily, sincerely, with great grace, and yet with so 
much homeliness, that a child would understand them. 
Sometimes his humour is broad, sometimes sly, some- 
times gay, but it is also exquisite and affectionate. His 
pathos does not go into the far depths of sorrow and pain, 
but it is always natural. He can bring tears into our eyes, 
and he can make us smile or be sad as he pleases. 

His eye for colour was superb and distinctive. He 
had a very fine ear for the music of verse, and the tale 
and the verse go together like voice and music. Indeed, 
so softly flowing and bright are they, that to read them 
is like listening in a meadow full of sunshine to a clear 
•itream rippling over its bed of pebbles. The English in 



11 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 6g 

A'hich they are written is almost the English of our 
time; and it is literary English. Chaucer made our 
tongue into a true means of poetry. He did more, he 
welded together the French and Enghsh elements in 
our language and made them into one English tool for 
the use of literature, and all our prose writers and poets 
derive their tongue from the language of the Canterbury 
Tales. They give him honour for this, but still more for 
that he was so fine an artist. Poetry is an art, and the 
artist in poetry is one who writes for pure and noble 
pleasure the thing he writes, and who desires to give to 
others the same or a similar pleasure by his poems 
which he had in writing them. The things he most 
cares about are that the form in which he puts his 
thoughts or feelings may be perfectly fitting to the sub- 
jects : and that subject, matter, and form should be as 
beautiful as possible — but for these he cares very 
greatly ; and in this Chaucer stands apart from the other 
poets of his time. Gower wrote with a set object, and 
nothing can be less beautiful than the form in which he 
puts his tales. The author of Piers Plowma^i wrote with 
the object of reform in social and ecclesiastical affairs, 
and his form is uncouth and harsh. Chaucer wrote be- 
cause he was full of emotion and joy in his own thoughts, 
and thought that others would weep and be glad with 
him, and the only time he ever morahses is in the tales of 
the Canon's Yeoman and the Manciple, written in his de- 
cay. He has, then, the best right to the poet's name. He 
is, within his own range, the clearest of English artists. 



70 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Finally, his position in the history of English poetry 
and towards his own time resembles that of Dante, whom 
he loved so well, in the history and poetry of Italy. 
Dante embodied all the past elements of the Middle 
Ages in his work, and he began the hterature, the 
thoughts, and the power of a new age. He was the 
Evening Star of the Mediaeval day and the Morning 
Star of the Renaissance. Chaucer also represented med- 
iaevalism though in a much more incomplete way than 
Dante, but he had, so far as poetry in England is con- 
cerned, more of the Renaissance spirit than Dante. He 
is more humanistic than even Spenser. England needed 
to live more than a century to get up to the level of 
Chaucer. Lastly, both Dante and he made their own 
country's tongue the tongue of noble literature. 

45. The Travels of Sir John Maundevile belong to 
this place which treats of story-telling. Whatever other 
English prose arose in the fourteenth century was theo- 
logical or scientific. John of Trevisa had, among other 
EngHsh translations, t,urned into EngUsh prose, 1387, 
the Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden. Various other 
prose treatises, beginning with those of Richard Rolle, 
had appeared. Chaucer himself translated two of his 
tales, that of the Parson, and that of Meliboeus, from 
the French into an involved prose ; and wrote in the 
same rude vehicle, his Boece, and his bock on the 
Astrolabe. We have already noticed the prose of Wyc- 
lif. But Maundevile' s Travels is a story-book. Maun- 
devile himself, the quaint and pleasant knight, is as 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER /I 

much an invention as Robinson Crusoe, and the travels 
as much an imposture as Geoffrey's History of the Ki?igs 
of Britain. But they had a similar charm, and when 
made up originally by Jean de Bourgogne, a physician 
who died at Liege in 1372, were received with delight 
and belief by the world, and nowhere with greater 
pleasure than in England, where they were translated 
into English prose by an anonymous writer of the late 
fourteenth or more probably fifteenth century. The 
prose is garrulous and facile, gliding with a pleasure 
in itself from legend to travellers' tales, from dreams 
to facts, from St. Albans to Jerusalem, from Cairo to 
Cathay. The book became a model of prose, and may 
even be called an early classic. 



72 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER III 

FROM Chaucer's death 1400, to Elizabeth, 1558 

46. The Fifteenth Century Poetry. — The last poems 
of Chaucer and Langland bring our story up to 1400. 
The hundred years that followed are the most barren 
in our literature. The influence of Chaucer lasted, and 
of the poems attributed to him, but now rejected by 
scholars, some certainly belong to the first half of this 
century. There are fifty poems, making up 17,000 lines, 
which have been wrongly attributed to Chaucer, and 
though some of them were contemporary with him, a 
number are by imitators of his in the fifteenth century. 
Some of these have a great charm. The Cuckoo and 
the Nightingale is a pleasant thing. The Complairit of 
the Black Knight is by Lydgate. The Court of Love 
and Chaucer's Dream are good but late imitations of 
the master. The Flower and the Leaf is by a woman 
whose name we should like to know, for the poem is 
lovely. ^' Moder of God and Virgin undefouled'' is by 
Hoccleve, and was long attributed to Chaucer. The 
triple Roundel, Merciles Beaute, is given by Professor 
Skeat to Chaucer, and at least is worthy of the poet ; 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH J^ 

and the Amorous Compleint and a Ballade of Com- 
pleyjit, may possibly be also his. There was then a 
considerable school of imitators, who followed the style, 
who had some of the imaginative spirit, but who failed 
in the music and the art of Chaucer. 

47. Thomas Hoccleve and John Lyugate. — Two of 
these imitators stand out from the rest by the extent 
of their work. Hoccleve, a London man, was a monot- 
onous versifier of the reigns of the three Henries, but 
he loved Chaucer well. In the MS. of his longest 
poem, the Gove7-nail of Princes, written before 14 13, 
he caused to be drawn, with fond idolatry, the portrait 
of his " master dear and father reverent," who had 
enlumined all the land with his books. He had a 
style of his own. Sometimes, in his playful imitations 
of Chaucer's Balades, and in his devotional poetry, 
such as his Moder of God, he reached excellence ; but 
his didactic and controversial aims finally overwhelmed 
his poetry. 

48. John Lydgate was a more worthy follower o^ 
Chaucer. A monk of Bury, and thirty years of age 
when Chaucer died, he yet wrote nothing of much 
importance till the reign of Henry V. He was a gay 
and pleasant person, though a long-winded poet, and 
he seems to have lived even in his old age, when he 
recalls himself as a boy " weeping for naught, anon 
after glad," the fresh and natural life of one who en- 
joyed everything ; but, like many gay persons, he had 
a vein of melancholy, and some of his best work, at 



74 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

least in the poet Gray's opinion, belongs to the realms 
of pathetic and moral poetry. But there was scarcely 
any literary work he could not do. He rhymed history, 
ballads, and legends, till the monastery was delighted. 
He made pageants for Henry VI., masques and May- 
games for aldermen, mummeries for the Lord Mayor, 
and satirical ballads on the follies of the day. It is 
impossible here to mention the tenth part of his mul- 
tifarious works, many of which are as yet unpubhshed. 
They are a strange mixture of the poet striving to be 
religious, and of the monk carried away by his passions 
and his gaiety. He may have been educated at Oxford, 
and perhaps travelled in France and Italy ; he knew 
the literature of his time, and he even dabbled in the 
sciences. He was as much a lover of nature as Chau- 
cer, but cannot make us feel the beauty of nature in 
the same way. It is his story-telling which links him 
closest to his master. His three chief poems are, first, 
The Troye Book, which is adapted from Guido's His- 
toria Trojana ; secondly, the Storie of Thebes, which 
is introduced as an additional Canterbury Tale, and is 
worked up from French romances on this subject. 
The third is the Falles of Princes, 1424-5, at which 
he worked till he was sixty years of age. It is a free 
translation of a French version of Boccaccio's De Cas- 
ibus Vij-oriim et Feminai'iun Illustriu7n. It tells the 
tragic fates of great men and women from the time 
of Adam to the capture of King John of France at 
Poitiers. The plan is picturesque ; the sorrowful dead 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 75 

appear before Boccaccio, pensive in his library, and 
each tells of his downfall. This is Lydgate's most im- 
portant, but by no means his best, poem ; and it had 
its influence on the future, for in the Mirror for Mag- 
istrates, at least eight Elizabethan poets united at differ- 
ent times to supplement his Falles of Pritices. 

A few minor poets do no more now than keep poetry 
alive. Another version of the Troy Story in Henry VI. 's 
time ; Hugh de Campeden's Sid?'ac, Thomas Chestre's 
Lay of Sir Launfal, and the translation of the Earl of 
Toulouse, prove that romances were still taken from the 
French. William Lichfield's Complaint betiveen God and 
Man, and William Nassington's Mirrour of Life, carry 
on the rehgious, and the Tournament of Totte7iha7?i the 
satirical, poetry. John Capgrave's translation of the Life 
of St. Catherine is less known than his Chronicle of 
£ngla7id dedicated to Edward IV. He, with John Hard- 
ing, a soldier of Agincourt, whose rhyming Chronicle 
belongs to Edward IV. 's reign, continue the historical 
poetry. A number of obscure versifiers, Thomas Norton, 
and George Ripley who wrote on alchemy, and Dame 
Juliana Berners' book on Hunting, bring us to the reign 
of Henry VII., when Skelton first began to write. Mean- 
while poetry, which had decayed in England, was 
flourishing in Scotland. 

49. Ballads, lays, fragments of romances, had been 
sung in England from the earliest times, and popular 
tales and jokes took form in short lyric pieces, to be ac- 
companied with music and dancing. In fact, the ballad 



^6 p:nglish literature chap. 

went over the whole land among the people. The tradei^ 
the apprentices, and poor of the cities, the peasantry, had 
their own songs. They tended to collect themselves 
romid some legendary name like Robin Hood, or some 
historical character made legendary, like Randolf, Earl 
of Chester. In the fourteenth century. Sloth, in Piers 
Plowman, does not know his paternoster, but he does 
know the rhymes of these heroes. Robin Hood was then 
well known in 1370. A crowd of minstrels sang them 
through city and village. The very friar sang them, " and 
made his English swete upon his tonge." The Tale of 
Gainelyn is a piece of minstrel poetry, of the forest type, 
and drew to it, as we know, the attention of Chaucer. 
Chaucer and Langland mention the French ballads which 
were sung in London, and these were freely translated. 
The popular song, '' When Adam dalf and Eve span," 
was a type of a class of socialistic ballads. The Battle of 
Otterbourne and The Hunting of the Cheviot were no 
doubt composed in the fourteenth century, but were not 
published till now. Two collections of Robin Hood bal- 
lads and The Nut Brown Maid, printed about the begin- 
ning of the sixteenth century, show that a fresh interest 
had then awakened in this outlaw literature to which we 
owe so much. It was not, however, till much later that 
any large collection of ballads was made ; and few, in the 
form we possess them, can be dated farther back than 
the reign of Elizabeth. 

50. Prose Literature. — Four men continued Engli'^h 
prose into the fifteenth century. The religious war be- 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH ^J^J 

tween the Lollards and the Church raged during the reigns 
of Henry V. and Henry VI., and in the time ^ of the 
latter Reginald Pecock took it out of Latin into homely 
English. He fought the Lollards with their own weapons, 
with public sermons in Enghsh, and with tracts in Eng- 
lish ; and after 1449, when Bishop of Chichester, published 
his works, The Repressor of overmuch Blaming of the 
Clergy and The Book of Faith. They pleased neither 
party. The Lollards disliked them because they defended 
the customs and doctrines of the Church. Churchmen 
burnt them because they agreed with the " Bible-men," 
that the Bible was the only rule of faith. Both abjured 
them because they said that doctrines were to be proved 
from the Bible by reason. Pecock is the first of all the 
Church theologians who wrote in English, and his books 
are good examples of our early prose. 

Sir John Fortescue's book on the Difference between 
Absolute and Limited Monarchy^ in Edward IV. 's reign, 
is less fine an example of the prose of English politics 
than Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur is of the 
prose of chivalry. This book, arranged and modelled 
into a labyrinthine story from French and contemporary 
English materials, is the work of a man of genius, and 
was ended in the ninth year of Edward IV., fifteen years 
before Caxton had finished printing it. Its prose, in its 
joyous simplicity, may well have charmed Caxton, who 
printed it with all the care of one who " loved the noble 
acts of chivalry." Caxton's own work added to the 
prose of England. Born of Kentish parents, he went to 



^8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAt 

the Low Countries in 1440, and learned his trade. The 
first book said to h^ve been printed in this country was 
The Game and Playe oj the Chesse, 1474. The first book 
that bears the inscription, " Imprynted by me, William 
Caxton, at Westmynstre," is The Dictes and Sayings of 
Philosophers. But the first English book Caxton made, 
and finished at Cologne in 147 1, was his translation of 
the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy, and in this book, 
and in his translation oi Reynard the Foxiiova. the Dutch, 
in his translation of the Golden Legend, and his re- 
editing of Trevisa's Chronicle, in which he " changed the 
rude and old English," he kept, by the fixing power of 
the press, the Midland English, which Chaucer had es- 
tablished as the tongue of hterature, from further degrada- 
tion. Forty years later Tyndale's New Testament fixed 
it more firmly, and the Elizabethan writers kept it in its 
purity. 

5 1 . The Foundations of the Elizabethan Literature. — 
The first of these may be found in Caxton's work. John 
Shirley, a gentleman of good family, and Chaucer's con- 
temporary, who died, a very old man, in 1449, deserves 
mention as a transcriber and preserver of the works of 
Chaucer and Lydgate, but Caxton fulfilled the task Shir- 
ley had begun. He printed Chaucer and Lydgate and 
Gower with zealous care. He printed the Chronicle of 
the Brut ; he secured for us the Morte Darthur. He 
had a tradesman's interest in publishing the romances, 
for they were the reading of the day ; but he could 
scarcely have done better for the interests of the coming 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 79 

literature. These books nourished the imagination of 
England, and supplied poet after poet with fine subjects 
for work, or fine frames for their subjects. He had not 
a tradesman's, but a loving literary, interest in printing the 
old English poets ; and in sending them out from his 
press Caxton kept up the continuity of English poetry. 
The poets after him at once began on the tnodels of 
Chaucer and Gower and Lydgate ; and the books them- 
selves being more widely read, not only made poets but 
a public that loved poetry. The imprinting of old Eng- 
lish poetry was one of the sources in this century of the 
Elizabethan Hterature. 

The second source was the growth of an interest in 
classic literature. All through the last two-thirds of this 
century, though so little creative work was done, the 
interest in that literature grew among men of the upper 
classes. The Wars of the Roses did not stop the reading 
of books. The Paston Letters, 142 2-1 509, the corre- 
spondence of a country family from Henry VI. to Henry 
Vn., are pleasantly, even correctly written, and contain 
passages which refer to translations of the classics and to 
manuscripts sent to and fro for reading. A great number 
of French translations of the Latin classics were read in 
England. Henry V. and VI., Edward IV., and some of 
the great nobles were lovers of books. Men like Duke 
Humphrey of Gloucester made libraries and brought over 
Italian scholars to England to translate Greek works. 
There were even scholars in England, like John, Lord 
Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who had won fame in the 



80 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

schools of Italy, and whose translations of Cicero's Dc 
Amicitid and of Caesar's De Bello Gallico prove, with his 
Latin letters, how worthy he was of the praise of Padua 
and the gratitude of Oxford. He added many MSS. to 
the library of Duke Humphrey. The two great universi 
ties were also now reformed; new colleges were founded, 
new libraries were established, Greek, Latin, and Italian 
MSS. were collected in them. The New Learning had 
begun to move in these great centres. A number of uni- 
versity men went to study in Italy, to Padua, Bologna, 
and Ferrara. Among these were Robert Flemmyng, 
Dean of Lincoln ; John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells ; 
WilHam Grey, Bishop of Ely; John Phreas, Provost 
of Balhol ; WilUam Sellynge, Fellow of All Souls, all of 
whom collected MSS. in Italy of the classics, with which 
they enriched the libraries of England. It is in this grow- 
ing influence of the great classic models of literature that 
we find the gathering together of another of the sources 
of that Elizabethan literature which seems to flower so 
suddenly, but which had been long preparing. 

52. The Italian Revival of Learning. — The impulse, 
as we see, came from Italy, and was due to that great 
humanistic movement which we call the Renaissance, 
and which had properly begun in Italy with Dante and 
his circle, with Petrarca and Boccaccio, with Giotto and 
Nicolo Pisano. It carried with it, as it went on reviving 
the thought, literature and law of Greece and Rome, the 
overthrow of Feudalism and the romantic poetry of the 
Middle Ages. It made classic literature and art the basis 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 8l 

of a new literature and a new art, which was not at first 
imitative, save of excellence of form. It began a new 
worship of beauty, a new worship of knowledge, and a 
new statesmanship. It initiated those new views of man 
and of human life, of its aims, rights, and duties, of its 
pleasures and pains, of religion, of knowledge, and of the 
whole course of the history of the world, which produced, 
as they fell on various types of humanity, the Refor- 
mation, a semi-pagan freedom of thought and life, the 
theories and ideas which took such furious form in the 
French Revolution, the boundless effort which attempted 
all things, and the boundless curiosity which penetrated 
into every realm of thought and feehng, and considered 
nothing too sacred or too remote for investigation by 
knowledge or for representation in art. At every one of 
those points it has affected literature up to the present day. 
No sooner had Petrarca and Boccaccio started it than 
Italy began to send eager searchers over Europe and 
chiefly to Constantinople. For more than seventy years 
before that city was taken by the Turk, shoals of MSS. 
had been carried from it into Italy together with a host 
of objects of ancient art. Before 1440 the best Latin 
classics and many of the Greek, were known, and were 
soon studied, lectured on, imitated, and translated. By 
1460 Italy, in all matters of thought, life, art, literature, 
and knowledge, was like a hive of bees in a warm sum- 
mer. We have seen with what slowness this vast impulse 
was felt in England in the fifteenth century. But it had 
begun, and in Elizabeth's time, pouring into England, it 



82 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

went forth conquering and to conquer. As France 
dominated the literature of England after the Conquest, 
till Chaucer, touched by Italy, made it English, so Italy 
dominated it till Shakespeare and his fellows, touched 
also by Italy, made it again English. 

53. There was now a Transition Period both in 

Prose and Poetry The reigns of Richard III. and 

Henry VII. brought forth no prose of any worth, but 
the country awakened into its first Renaissance with the 
accession of Henry VIIL, 1509. John Colet, Dean of St. 
Paul's, with William Lilly, the grammarian, set on foot a 
school where the classics were taught in a new and prac- 
tical way, and between the year 1500 and the Reforma- 
tion twenty grammar-schools were established. Erasmus, 
who had all the enthusiasm which sets others on fire, had 
come to England in 1497, and found Grocyn and Linacre 
at Oxford, teaching the Greek they had learnt from Chal- 
condylas at Florence. He learnt Greek from them, and 
found eager admiration of his own scholarship in Bishop 
Fisher, Sir Thomas More, Colet, and Archbishop War- 
ham. From these men a liberal and moderate theology 
spread, which soon, however, perished in the heats of the 
Reformation. But the New Learning they had started 
grew rapidly, assisted by the munificence of Wolsey; and 
Cambridge, under Cheke and Smith, excelled even Ox- 
ford in Greek learning. The study of the great classics 
set free the minds of men, stirred and gave Hfe to letters, 
woke up English prose from its sleep, and kindled the 
young English intelligence in the universities. Its earliest 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 83 

prose was its best. It was in 1513 (not printed till 1557) 
that Thomas More wrote the history in English, of 
Edward V.'s life and Richard III.'s usurpation. The 
simplicity of his genius showed it .elf in the style, and 
his wit in the picturesoae method and the dramatic 
dialogue that graced the book. This stately historical 
manner was laid aside by More in the tracts of nervous 
Enghsh with which he rephed to Tyndale, but both his 
styles are remarkable for their purity. Of all the " strong 
words " he uses, three out of four are Teutonic. More's 
most famous work, the Utopia, 15 16, was written in 
Latin, but was translated afterwards, in 155 t, by Ralph 
Robinson. It tells us more of the curiosity the New 
Learning had awakened in Enghshmen concerning all 
the problems of life, society, government, and religion, 
than any other book of the time. It is the representative 
book of that short but well-defined period which we may 
call English Renaissance before the Reformation. We see 
in all this movement another of the sources of the Eliza- 
bethan outburst. Much of the progress of prose was due 
to the patronage of the young king. It was the king who 
asked Lord Berners to translate Froissarf, a translation 
which in 1523 made a landmark in our tongue. It was 
the king who supported Sir Thomas Elyot in his effort to 
improve education, and encouraged him to write books 
(1531-46) in the vulgar tongue that he might please 
his countrymen. It was the king who made Leland, 
our first English writer on antiquarian subjects, the 
''King's Antiquary," 1533. It was the king to whonj 



84 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Roger Ascham dedicated his first work, and who sent 
him abroad to pursue his studies. This book, the 
Toxophilus, or the School of Shooting, 1545, was writ- 
ten for the pleasure of the yeomen and gentlemen of 
England in their own tongue. Ascham apologises for 
this, and the apology marks the state of Enghsh prose. 
" Everything has been done excellently well in Greek 
and Latin, but in the English tongue so meanly that no 
man can do worse." But " I have written this Enghsh 
matter, in the English tongue for English men." Ascham's 
quaint English has its charm, and he did not know that 
the very rudeness of language of which he complained 
was in reality laying the foundations of an English more 
Teutonic and less Latin than the Enghsh of Chaucer. 

54. Prose and the Reformation. — The bigotry, the 
avarice, and the violent controversy of the Reformation 
killed for a time the New Learning, but the Reformation 
did a vast work for English literature, and prepared the 
language for the Elizabethan writers, by its version of 
the Bible. William Ty]s;dale's Translation of the Neiv 
Testament, 1525, fixed our standard English once for all, 
and brought it finally into every Enghsh home. Tyndale 
held fast to pure English. In his two volumes of polit- 
ical tracts " there are only twelve Teutonic words which 
are now obsolete, a strong proof of the influence his 
translation of the Bible has had in preserving the old 
speech of England." Of the 6000 words of the Author- 
ised Version, still in a great part his translation, only 250 
are not now in common use. "Three out of four of his 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 85 

nouns, adverbs, and veros are Teutonic." And he spoke 
sharply enough to those who said our tongue was so rude 
that the Bible could not be translated into it. " It is not 
so rude as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue 
agreeth more with the English than the Latin ; a thou- 
sand parts better may it be translated into the English 
than into the Latin." 

Tyndale was helped in his English Bible by William 
Roy, a runaway friar ; and his friend Rogers, the first 
martyr in Queen Mary's reign, added the translation of 
the Apocrypha, and made up what was wanting in Tyn- 
dale's translation from Chronicles to Malachi out of 
Coverdale's translation. It was this Bible which, re- 
vised by Coverdale and edited and re-edited as Crom- 
welPs Bible, 1539, and again as Craiuner's Bible, 1540, 
was set up in every parish church in England. It got 
north into Scotland and made the Lowland English more 
like the London English. It passed over to the Prot- 
estant settlements in Ireland. After its revisal in 161 1 
it went with the Puritan Fathers to New England and 
fixed the standard of English in America. Many mill- 
ions of people now speak the English of Tyndale's Bible, 
and there is no book which has had, through the Au- 
thorised Version, so great an influence on the style of 
English literature and the standard of English prose. In 
Edward VI.'s reign also Cranmer edited the English 
Prayer Book, 1549-52. Its English is a good deal 
mixed with Latin words, and its style is sometimes weak 
or heavy, but on the whole it is a fine example of stately 



86 ENGLISH LITERATURE cHAP 

prose. It also steadied our speech. Latimer, on the 
contrary, whose Sermon on the Ploughers and others were 
dehvered in 1549 and in 1552, wrote in a plain, shrewd 
style, which by its humour and rude directness made him 
the first preacher of his day. On the whole the Refor- 
mation fixed and confirmed our English tongue, but at the 
same time it brought in through theology a large number 
of Latin words. The pairing of Enghsh and Latin words 
{acknowledge and confess, etc.) in the Prayer Book is 
a good example of both these results. 

55. Poetry in the Sixteenth Century under the In- 
fluence of Chaucer. — One source, we have said, of the 
Elizabethan literature, before Elizabeth, was the recovery, 
through Caxton's press, of Chaucer and his men. It is 
probable that the influence of Italian literature on EngUsh 
poets was now kept from becoming overwhelming by the 
strong English element in Chaucer. At least this was 
one of the reasons for the clear poetic individuality of 
England ; and we can easily trace its balancing effect 
in Spenser. It was of importance, then, that before 
Surrey and Wyatt again brought Italian elements into 
English verse, there should be a revival of Chaucer, 
both in England and Scotland. This transition period, 
short as it was, is of interest. Stephen Hawes, in the 
reign of Henry VIL, represented the transition by an 
imitation of the old work. Amid many poems, some 
more imitative of Lydgate than of Chaucer, his long alle- 
gorical poem, entitled the Pastime of Pleasure, is the 
best. In fact, it is the first, since the middle of the 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH S^ 

fifteenth century, in which Imagination again began to 
plume her wings and soar. Within the realm of art, it 
corresponded to that effort to resuscitate the dead body 
of the Old Chivalry which Henry VIII. and Francis I. 
attempted. It goes back for its inspiration to the J^o- 
mance of the Rose, and is an allegory of the right educa- 
tion of a knight, showing how Grand Amour won at last 
La Bel Pucell. But, like all soulless resurrections, it 
died quickly. 

On the other hand, John Skelton represents the 
transition by at first following the old poetry, and then, 
pressed upon by the storm of human life in the present, 
by taking an original path. His imitative poetry belongs 
mostly to Henry VII. 's time, but when the rehgious and 
political disturbances began in Henry VIII. 's time, 
Skelton became excited by the cry of the people for 
Church reformation. His poem. Why come ye not to 
Court? was a fierce satire on the great Cardinal. That 
of Colin Clout was the cry of the country Colin, and of 
the Clout or mechanic of the town against the corruption 
of the Church ; and it represents the whole popular feel- 
ing of the time just before the movement of the Reforma- 
tion took a new turn from the opposition of the Pope to 
Henry's divorce. Both are written in short " rude rayling 
rimes, pleasing only the popular ear," and Skelton chose 
them for that purpose. He had a rough, impetuous 
power, but Skelton could use any language he pleased. 
He was an admirable scholar. Erasmus calls him the 
" glory and light of English letters," and Caxton says 



88 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

that he improved our language. His poem, the Bowge oj 
Court (rewards of court), is full of powerful satire against 
the corruption of the times, and of vivid impersonations 
of the virtues and vices. But he was not only the satirist. 
The pretty and new love lyrics that we owe to him fore- 
shadow the Elizabethan imagination and life ; and the 
Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe, which tells, in imitation of 
Catullus, the grief of a nun called Jane Scrope for the 
death of her sparrow, is a gay and inventive poem. 
Skelton stands — a landmark in English literature — be- 
tween the mere imitation of Chaucer and the rise of a new 
Italian influence in England in the poems of Surrey and 
Wyatt. In his own special work he was entirely original. 
The Ship of Fooles, 1508, by Barclay, is of this time, 
but it has no value. It is a paraphrase of a famous 
German work by Sebastian Brandt, published at Basel. 
It was popular because it attacked the folKes and ques- 
tions of the time. Its sole interest to us is in its pictures 
of famihar manners and popular customs. But Barclay 
did other work, and he established the eclogue in Eng- 
land. With him the transition time is over, and the 
curtain is ready to rise on the EHzabethan age of poetry. 
While we wait, we will make an interlude out of the work 
of the poets of Scotland. 

SCOTTISH POETRY 

56. Scottish Poetry is poetry written in the English 
tongue by men living in Scotland. These men, though 
caUing themselves Scotsmen, are of good Enghsh blood. 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 89 

But the blood, as I think, was mixed with a larger infu- 
sion of Celtic blood than elsewhere. 

Old Northumbria extended from the Humber to the 
Firth of Forth, leaving however on its western border a 
strip of unconquered land, which took in Lancashire, 
Cumberland, and Westmoreland in our England, and, 
over the border, most of the western country between 
the Clyde and Solway Firth. This unconquered country 
was the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde, and was dwelt in 
by the Celtic race. The present English part of it was 
conquered and the Celts absorbed. But in the part to 
the north of the Solway Firth the Celts were not con- 
quered and not absorbed. They remained, lived with 
the Englishmen who were settled over the old Nor- 
thumbria, intermarried with them, and became under Scot 
kings a people with the Celtic elements more dominant 
in them than in the rest of our nation. English Htera- 
ture in the Lowlands of Scotland would then retain more 
of these Celtic elements than elsewhere ; and there are 
certain peculiarities infused through the whole of English 
poetry in Scotland which are especially Celtic. 

57. Celtic Elements of Scottish Poetry. — The first 
of these is the love of wild natuj'e for its own sake. 
There is a passionate, close, and poetical observation and 
description of natural scenery in Scotland from the 
earhest times of its poetry, such as we do not possess in 
English poetry till the time of Thomson. The second is 
the love of colour. All early Scottish poetry differs from 
English in the extraordinary way in which colour is in- 



90 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

sisted on, and at times in the lavish exaggeration of it 
The third is the wittier and coarser humour in the Scot- 
tish poetry, which is distinctly Celtic in contrast with 
that humour which has its root in sadness and which be- 
longs to the Teutonic races. Few things are really more 
different than the humour of Chaucer and the humour of 
Dunbar, than the humour of Cowper and the humour of 
Burns. These are the special Celtic elements in the 
Lowland poetry 

58. But there are also national elements in it which, 
exaggerated and isolated as they were, are also Celtic. 
The wild individuality of the Gaelic clans was not un- 
represented in the Lowland kingdom, and became there 
as assertive a nationality as Ireland has ever proclaimed. 
The EngHsh were as national as the Scots, but they were 
not oppressed. But for nearly forty years the Scots re- 
sisted for their very life the efforts of England to conquer 
them. And the war of freedom left its traces on theii 
poetry from Barboux to Burns and Walter Scott in the 
almost obtrusive way in which Scotland, and Scottish 
liberty, and Scottish heroes are thrust forward in their 
verse. Their passionate nationality appears in another 
form in their descriptive poetry. The natural descrip- 
tion of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or even Milton, is not 
distinctively EngHsh. But in Scotland it is always the 
scenery of their own land that the poets describe. Even 
when they are imitating Chaucer they do not imitate his 
conventional landscape. They put in a Scottish land- 
scape ; and in the work of such men as Gawin Douglas 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH QI 

the love of Scotland and the love of nature mingle their 
influences together to make him sit down, as it were, to 
paint, with his eye on everything he paints, a series of 
Scottish landscapes. 

59. The first of the Scottish poets, omitting Thomas 
of Erceldoune, is John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aber- 
deen. His long poem of The Bruce, 1375-7, represents 
the whole of the eager struggle for Scottish freedom 
against the English which closed at Bannockburn ; and 
the national spirit, which I have mentioned, springs in it, 
full grown, into life. But it is temperate, it does not 
pass into the fury against England, which is so plain in 
writers like Blind Harry, who, about 1461, composed a 
long poem in the heroic couplet of Chaucer on the deeds 
of William Wallace. In Henry V.'s reign, Andrew of 
Wyntoun wrote his Oryginale Cronykil of Scotland, one 
of the rhyming chronicles of the time. It is only in the 
next poet that we find the full influence of Chaucer, 
and it is thereafter continuous till the Elizabethan time. 
James the First of Scotland was prisoner in England 
for nineteen years, till 1422. There he read Chaucer, 
and fell in love with Lady Jane Beaufort, niece of 
Henry IV. The poem which he wrote — The King's 
Quair (the quire or book) — is done in imitation of 
Chaucer, and in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, which 
from James's use of it is called " Rime Royal." In six 
cantos, sweeter, tenderer, and purer than any verse till 
we come to Spenser, he describes the beginning of his 
love and its happy end. " I must write," he says, " so 



92 ENGLISH LITERATUR2 CHAi 

much because I have come so from Hell to Heaven.' 
Though miitative of Chaucer, his work has an original 
element in it. The natural description is more varied, 
the colour is more vivid, and there is a modern self- 
reflective quality, a touch of mystic feeling which does 
not belong to Chaucer. 

Robert Henryson, who died about 1500, a school- 
master in Dunfermline, was also an imitator of Chaucer, 
and his Testameni of Cresseid continues Chaucer's 
Troilus. But he did not do only imitative work. He 
treated the fables of ^sop in a new fashion. In his 
hands they are long stories, full of pleasant dialogue, 
political allusions, and with elaborate morals attached to 
them. They have a peculiar Scottish tang, and are full 
of descriptions of Scottish scenery. He also reanimated 
the short pastoral in his Robin and Makyne. It is a 
natural, prettily-turned dialogue ; and a flashing Celtic 
wit, such as charms us in Duncan Gray, runs through it. 
The individuality which reformed two modes of poetic 
work in these poems appears again in his sketch of the 
graces of womanhood in the Garment of Good Ladies ; 
a poem of the same type as those thoughtful lyrics which 
describe what is best in certain phases of professions, or 
of life, such as Sir H. Wotton's Character of a Happy 
Life, or Wordsworth's Happy Warrior. 

But among many poets whom we need not mention, 
the greatest is William Dunbar. He carries the in- 
fluence of Chaucer on to the end of the fifteenth century 
and into the sixteenth. His genius, though masculine, 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 93 

loved beauty, and his work was as varied in its range as . 
it was original. He followed the form and plan of Chau- 
cer in his two poems of The Thistle a?id the Rose, 1503, 
and the Goldejt Terge, 1508, the first on the marriage of 
James IV. to Margaret Tudor, the second an allegory of 
Love, Beauty, Reason, and the poet. In both, though 
they begin with Chaucer's conventional May morning, 
the natural description becomes Scottish, and in both the 
national enthusiasm of the poet is strongly marked. But 
he soon ceased to imitate. The vigorous fun of the 
satires and of the satirical ballads that he wrote is only 
matched by their coarseness, a coarseness and a fun that 
descended to Burns. Perhaps Dunbar's genius is still 
higher in a wild poem in which he personifies the seven 
deadly sins, and describes their dance, with a mixture of 
horror and humour which makes the Httle thing unique. 

A man as remarkable as Dunbar is Gawin Douglas, 
Bishop of Dunkeld, who died in 1522, at the Court of 
Henry VIII., and was buried in the Savoy. He trans- 
lated into verse Ovid's Art of Love, now lost, and after- 
wards, with truth and spirit, the ySjietds of Virgil, 15 13. 
To each book of the ^neid he wrote a prologue of his 
own. Three of them are descriptions of the country in 
May, in Autumn, and in Winter. The scenery is alto- 
gether Scottish, and the few Chaucerisms that appear 
seem absurdly out of place in a picture of nature which 
is painted with excessive care and directly from the truth. 
The colour is superb, but the landscape is not composed 
by any art into a whole. There is nothing like it in 



94 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

England till Thomson's Seasons, and Thomson was a 
Scotsman. Only the Celtic love of nature can account 
for the vast distance between work Hke this and contem- 
porary work in England such as Skelton's. Of Douglas's 
other original work, one poem, the Palace of Honour^ 
1501, continues the influence of Chaucer. 

There were a number of other Scottish poets who are 
all remembered by Dunbar in his Lament for the Makars, 
and praised by Sir David Lyndsay, whom it is best to 
mention in this place, because he still connects Scottish 
poetry with Chaucer. He was born about 1490, and was 
the last of the old Scottish school, and the most popular. 
He is the most popular because he is not only the poet, 
but also the reformer. His poem the Dreme, 1528, links 
him back to Chaucer. It is in the manner of the old 
poet. But its scenery is Scottish, and instead of the May 
morning of Chaucer, it opens on a winter's day of wind 
and sleet. The place is a cave over the sea, whence 
Lyndsay sees the weltering of the ocean. Chaucer goes 
to sleep over Ovid or Cicero, Lyndsay falls into a dream 
as he thinks of the "false world's instability," wavering 
like the sea waves. The difference marks not only the 
difference of the two countries, but the different natures 
of the men. Chaucer did not care much for the popular 
storms, and loved the Court more than the Commonweal. 
Lyndsay in the Dreme and in two other poems — the 
Complaint to the King, and the Testament of the King's 
Papyngo — is absorbed in the evils and sorrows of the 
people, in the desire to reform the abuses of the Church, 



ni FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 95 

of the Court, of party, of the nobility. In 1539 his 
Satire of the Three Estates, a Morality interspersed with 
interludes, was represented before James V. at Linlith- 
gow. It was a daring attack on the ignorance, profli- 
gacy, and exactions of the priesthood, on the vices and 
flattery of the favourites — "a mocking of abuses used in 
the country by diverse sorts of estates." A still bolder 
poem, and one thought so even by himself, is the Mon- 
archie, 1553, his last work. He is as much the reformer, 
as he is the poet, of a transition time. Still his verse 
hath charms, but it was neither sweet nor imaginative. 
He had genuine satire, great moral breadth, much 
preaching power in verse, coarse, broad humour in 
plenty, and more dramatic power and invention than 
the rest of his fellows. 

60. The Elizabethan Dawn : Wyatt and Surrey. — 

While poetry under Skelton and Lyndsay became an 
instrument of reform, it revived as an art at the close of 
Henry VIII. 's reign in Sir Thomas Wyatt and Lord 
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. They were both ItaUan 
travellers, and in bringing back to England the inspi- 
ration they had gained from Italian and classic models 
they re-made English poetry. They are our first really 
modern poets ; the first who have anything of the modern 
manner. Though Itahan in sentiment, their language is 
more English than Chaucer's, that is, they use fewer 
romance words. They handed down this purity of 
English to the Elizabethan poets, to Sackville, Spenser, 



96 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and .Shakespeare. They introduced a new kind of poetry, 
the amourist poetry — a poetry extremely personal, and 
personal as English poetry had scarcely ever been before. 
The amourists, as they are called, were poets who com- 
posed a series of poems on the subject of the joys and 
sorrows of their loves — sonnets mingled with lyrical 
pieces after the manner of Petrarca, and sometimes in 
accord with the love philosophy he built on Plato. They 
began with Wyatt and Surrey. They did not die out till 
the end of James I.'s reign. The subjects of Wyatt and 
Surrey were chiefly lyrical, and the fact that they imitated 
the same model has made some likeness between them. 
Like their personal characters, however, the poetry of 
Wyatt is the more thoughtful and the more strongly felt, 
but Surrey's has a sweeter movement and a hvelier fancy. 
Both did this great thing for English verse — they chose 
an exquisite model, and in imitating it " corrected the 
ruggedness of Enghsh poetry." A new standard was 
made below which the future poets should not fall. They 
also added new stanza measures to English verse, and 
enlarged in this way the "lyrical range." Surrey was 
the first, in his translation of the Second and Fourth 
Books of VirgiVs y^neid, to use the ten-syllabled, un- 
rhymed verse, which we now call blank verse. In his 
hands it is not worthy of praise. Sackville, Lord Buck- 
hurst, introduced it into drama ; Marlowe made it the 
proper verse of the drama. In plays it has a special 
manner of its own ; in poetry proper it was, we may say, 
not only created but perfected by Milton. 



%a FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 97 

The new impulse thus given to poetry was all but 
arrested by the bigotry that prevailed during the reigns 
of Edward VI. and Mary, and all the work of the New 
Learning seemed to be useless. But Thomas Wilson's 
book in EngHsh on Rhetoric and Logic in 1553, and the 
publication of Thomas Tusser's Pointes of Hiisbandrie and 
of Tottel's Miscellajiy of Uncertain Authors, 1557, in the 
last year of Mary's reign, proved that something was 
stirring beneath the gloom. The Miscellany contained 
40 poems by Surrey, 96 by Wyatt, 40 by Grimoald, and 
134 by uncertain authors. The date should be remem- 
bered, for it is the first printed book of modern English 
poetry. It proves that men cared now more for the new 
than the old poets, that the time of mere imitation of 
Chaucer was over, and that of original creation begun. 
It ushers in the Elizabethan literature. 

H 



gS ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

6 1. Elizabethan Literature, as a literature, may be 
said to begin with Surrey and Wyatt. But as their 
poems were published shortly before EHzabeth came to 
the throne, we date the beginning of the early period oi 
EHzabethan literature from the year of her accession, 

1558. That period lasted till 1579, and was followed by 
the great Hterary outburst of the days of Spenser and 
Shakespeare. The apparent suddenness of this outburst 
has been an object of wonder. I have already noticed 
its earUest sources in the last hundred years. And now 
we shall best seek its nearest causes in the work done 
during the early years of EHzabeth. The flood-tide which 
began in 1579 was preceded by a very various, plentiful, 
but inferior literature, in which new forms of poetry and 
prose-writing were tried, and new veins of thought opened. 
These twenty years from the Mirror for Magistrates^ 

1559, to the Shepheard'^s Calendar, 1579, sowed seeds 
which when the time came broke into flower. We wonder 
at the flower, but it grew naturally through seed and stem, 
leaves and blossom. They made the flower, since the 



rv THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 99 

circumstances were favourable. And never in England, 
save in our own century, were they so favourable. 

62. First Elizabethan Period, 1558-1570. — (i.) The 
literary, prose of the beginning of this time is represented 
by the Scholemaster of Ascham, published in 1570. This 
nook, which is on education, is the work of the scholar of 
the New Learning of the reign of Henry VIII. who has 
lived on into another period. It is not, properly speak- 
ing, Elizabethan ; it is like a stranger in a new land and 
among new manners. 

(2.) Poetry is first represented by Sackville, Lord 
Buckhurst. The Mirror for Magistrates ^ for which he 
wrote, 1563, the Induction and one tale, is a series of 
tragic poems on the model of Boccaccio's Falls of Princes^ 
already imitated by Lydgate. Seven poets at least, with 
Sackville, contributed tales to it, but his poem is poetry 
of so fine a quality that it stands absolutely alone during 
these twenty years. The Induction paints the poet's 
descent into Avernus, and his meeting with Henry 
Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose fate he tells with 
a grave and inventive imagination, and with the first true 
music which we hear since Chaucer, Being written in 
the manner and stanza of the elder poets, this poem ha? 
been called the transition between Lydgate and Spenser 
But it does not truly belong to the old time ; it is as 
modern as Spenser, and its allegorical representations 
are in the same manner as those of Spenser. George 
Gascoigne, whose satire, the Steele Glas^ 1576, is our 
first long satirical poem, deserves mention among a 



lOO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

crowd of poets who came after Sackville. They wrote 
legends, pieces on the wars and discoveries of the 
EngHshmen of their day, epitaphs, epigrams, songs, son- 
nets, elegies, fables, and sets of love poems ; and the besu 
things they did were collected in such miscellaneous 
collections as ^^ Paradise of Dainty Devices, m 1576. 
This book, with Tottel's, set on foot both now and in the 
later years of Elizabeth a crowd of other miscellanies of 
poetry which represent the vast number of experiments 
made in Elizabeth's time, in the subjects, the metres, 
and the various kinds of lyrical poetry. At present, all 
we can say is that lyrical poetry, and that which we may 
call '' occasional poetry," were now in full motion. The 
popular Ballads also took a wide range. The registers 
of the Stationers' Company prove that there was scarcely 
any event of the day, nor almost any controversy in lit- 
erature, politics, religion, which was not the subject of 
verse, and of verse into which imagination strove to enter. 
The ballad may be said to have done the work of the 
modern weekly review. It stimulated and informed the 
popular intellectual life of England. 

(3.) Frequent translations were now made from the 
classical writers. We know the names of more than 
twelve men who did this work, and there must have been 
many more. Already in Henry VIII.'s and Edward VI, 's 
time, ancient authors had been made English ; and now 
before 1579, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Demosthenes, Plu- 
tarch, and many Greek and Latin plays, were translated. 
Among the rest, Phaer's Virgil^ 1562, Arthur Golding's 



I 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 10 1 

Ovid's Metajno?'phoses, 1567, and George Turbervile*s 
Historical Epistles of Ovid, 1567, are, and especially the 
first, remarkable. The English people in this way were 
brought into contact, more than before, with the classical 
spirit, and again it had its awakening power. We cannot 
say that either the fineness or compactness of classic 
work appeared in these heterogeneous translations, 
though one curious result of them was the craze which 
followed, and which Gabriel Harvey strove, fortunately 
in vain, to impose on Spenser, for reproducing classical 
metres in English poetry. Nor were the old English 
poets neglected. Though Chaucer and Lydgate, Lang- 
land, and the re?t, were no longer imitated in this time 
when fresh creation had begun, they were studied^ and 
they added their impulse of life to original poets like 
Spenser. 

(4.) Theological Reform stirred men to another kind 
of literary work. A great number of polemical ballads, 
pamphlets, and plays issued every year from obscure 
presses and filled the land. Poets like George Gas- 
coigne and still more Barnaby Googe, represent in their 
work the hatred the young men had of the old religious 
system. It was a spirit which did not do much for 
literature, but it quickened the habit of composition, 
and made it easier. The Bible also became common 
property, and its language ghded into all theological 
writing and gave it a literary tone; while the publica- 
tion of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments or Book o) 
Martyrs, 1563, gave to the people all over England a 



I02 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

book which, by its simple style, the ease of its story- 
telling, and its popular charm made the very peasants 
who heard it read feel what is meant by literature. 

(5.) The history of the country and its manners was 
not neglected. A whole class of antiquarians wrote 
steadily, if with some dulness, on this subject. Grafton, 
Stow, Holinshed, and others, at least supplied materials 
for the study and use of historical dramatists. 

(6.) "Tht love of stories grew quickly. The old Eng- 
Hsh tales and ballads were eagerly read and collected. 
Italian tales by various authors were translated and 
sown so broadcast over London by William Painter in 
his collection, The Palace of Pleasure ^ 1566, by George 
Turbervile, in his Tragical Tales in verse, and by 
others, that it is said they were to be bought at every 
bookstall The Romances of Spain and Italy poured 
in, and Amadis de Gaul, and the companion romances 
the Arcadia of Sannazaro and the Ethiopiari History, 
were sources of books like Sidney's Arcadia, and, with 
the classics, supplied materials for the pageants. A 
great number of subjects for prose and poetry were 
thus made ready for literary men, and prose fiction 
became possible in Enghsh Hterature. 

(7.) All over Europe, and especially in Italy, now 
closely linked to England, the Renaissance had pro- 
duced a wild spirit of exhausting all the possibilities 
of human life. Every form, every game of Hfe, was 
tried, every fancy of goodness or wickedness followed 
for the fancy's sake. Men said to themselves " Attempt, 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE IO3 

Attempt." The act accompanied the thought. Eng- 
land at last shared in this passion, but in EngUsh Hfe 
it was directed. There was a great liberty given to 
men to live and do as they pleased, provided the 
queen was worshipped and there was no conspiracy 
against the State. That much direction did not apply 
to purely literary production. Its attemptings were 
unhmited. Anything, everything was tried, especially 
in the drama. 

(8.) The masques, pageants, interludes, and plays that 
were written at this time are scarcely to be counted. 
At every great ceremonial, whenever the queen made 
a progress or visited one of the great lords or a uni- 
versity, at the houses of the nobility, and at the Court 
on all important days, some obscure versifier, or a 
young scholar at the Inns of Court, at Oxford or at 
Cambridge, produced a masque or a pageant, or wrote 
or translated a play. The habit of play-writing became 
common; a kind of school, one might almost say a 
manufacture of plays, arose, which partly accounts for 
the rapid production, the excellence, and the multitude 
of plays that we find after 1576. Represented all over 
England, these masques, pageants, and dramas were 
seen by the people, who were thus accustomed to take 
an interest, though of an uneducated kind, in the larger 
drama that was to follow. The Hterary men on the 
other hand ransacked, in order to find subjects and 
scenes for their pageants, ancient and mediaeval, magi- 
cal, and modern literature, and many of them in doing 



I04 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

SO became not fine but multifarious scholars. The 
imagination of England was quickened and educated 
in this way, and as Biblical stories were well known 
and largely used, the images of oriental life were kept 
among the materials of dramatic imagination. 

(9.) Another influence bore on literature. It was 
that given by the stories of the voyagers, who, in the 
new commercial activity of the country, penetrated into 
remote lands, and saw the strange monsters and savages 
which the poets now added to the fairies, dwarfs, and 
giants of the Romances. Before 1579, books had been 
pubhshed on the north-west passage. Frobisher had 
made his voyages, and Drake had started, to return in 
1580, to amaze all England with the . story of his sail 
round the world and of the riches of the Spanish Main. 
We may trace everywhere in EHzabethan literature the 
impression made by the wonders told by the sailors and 
captains who explored and fought from the North Pole 
to the Southern Seas. 

(10.) Then there was the freest possible play of lit- 
erary criticism. Every wine-shop in London, every 
room at the university, was filled with the talk of young 
men on any work which was published and on the manu- 
scripts which were read. Out of this host emerged the 
men of genius. Moreover, far apart from these, there 
were in England now, among all the noise and stir, quiet 
scholars, such as Contarini and Pole had been in Italy, 
followers of Erasmus and Colet, precursors of Bacon, 
who kept the lamp of scholarship burning, and who, 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE I05 

when literature became beautiful, nurtured and praised 
it. Nor were the young nobles, who like Surrey had 
been in Italy and had known what was good, less useful 
now. There were many men who, when Shakespeare 
and Spenser came, were able to say — ''This is good," 
and who drew the new genius into light. 

(11.) Lastly, we have proof that there was a large 
number of persons writing who did not publish their 
works. It was considered at this time, that to write for 
the public injured a man, and unless he were driven by 
poverty he kept his manuscript by him. But things 
were changed when a great genius like Spenser took the 
world by storm ; when Lyly's Eiiphues enchanted court 
society; when a fine gentleman like Sir Phihp Sidney 
was known to be a writer. Literature was made the 
fashion, and the disgrace being taken from it, the pro- 
duction became enormous. Manuscripts written and 
laid by were at once sent forth ; and when the rush 
began it grew by its own force. Those who had previ- 
ously been kept from writing by its unpopularity now 
took it up eagerly, and those who had written before 
wrote twice as much now. The great improvement also 
in hterary quality is also accounted for by this — that 
men strove to equal such work as Sidney's or Spenser's, 
and that a wider and more exacting criticism arose. 
Nor must one omit to say, that owing to this employ- 
ment of life on so vast a number of subjects, and to the 
voyages, and to the new literatures searched into, and to 
the heat of theoloofical strife, a multitude of new words 



I06 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

Streamed into the language, and enriched the vocabulary 
of imagination. Shakespeare uses 15,000 words. 

6^. The Later Literature of Elizabeth's Reign, 1579- 
1602, begins with the publication of Lyly's Euphues^ 
1579, and Spenser's Shepheards Calendar, also in 1579, 
and with the writing of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and 
his Apology for Poetrie, 15 80-1. It will be best to 
leave the poem of Spenser aside till we come to write 
of the poets. 

The Euphues was the work of John Lyly, poet and 
dramatist. It is in two parts, Euphues the Anatomie of 
Wit, and Euphues and his England. In six years it ran 
through five editions, so great was its popularity. Its 
prose style is odd to an excess, " precious " and sweet- 
ened, but it has care and charm, and its very faults were 
of use in softening the solemnity and rudeness of previ- 
ous prose. The story is long, and is more a loose frame- 
work into which Lyly could fit his thoughts on love, 
friendship, education, and religion, than a true story. It 
made its mark because it fell in with all the fantastic and 
changeable life of the time. Its far-fetched conceits, its 
extravagance of gallantry, its endless metaphors from the 
classics and especially from natural history, its curious 
and gorgeous descriptions of dress, and its pale imitation 
of chivalry, were all reflected in the life and talk and 
dress of the court of Elizabeth. It became the fashion 
to talk " Euphuism," and, like the Utopia of More, Lyly's 
book has created an English word. 

The Arcadia was the work of Sir Philip Sidney, and 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE lO/ 

though written about 1580, did not appear till after his 
death. It is more poetic and more careless in style than 
the Euphues, but it endeavours to get rid of the mere 
quaintness for quaintness' sake, and of the far-fetched 
fancies, of Euphuism. It is less the image of the time 
than of the man. We know that bright and noble figure, 
the friend of Spenser, the lover of Stella, the last of the 
old knights, the poet, the critic, and the Christian, who, 
wounded to the death, gave up the cup of water to a 
dying soldier. We find his whole spirit in the story of 
the Arcadia, in the first two books and part of the third, 
which alone were written by him. It is a pastoral ro- 
mance, after the fashion of the Spanish romances, col- 
oured by his love of his sister, Lady Pembroke, and by 
the scenery of Wilton under the woods of which he wrote 
it. The characters are real, but the story is confused 
by endless digressions. The sentiment is too fine and 
delicate for the world of action. The descriptions are 
picturesque ; a quaint or poetic thought or an epigram 
appear in every line. There is no real art in it, nor is it 
true prose. But it is so full of poetical thought that it 
became a mine into which poets dug for subjects. 

64. Poetic Criticism began before the publication of 
the Faerie Queene, and its rise shows the interest now 
awakened in poetry. The Discourse of English Poetrie, 
1586, written by William Webbe ''to stirre up some other 
of meet abihtie to bestow travell on the matter," was 
followed three years after by the Art of English Foesie, 
attributed to George Puttenham, an elaborate book, 



ro8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

"written," he says, "to help the courtiers and the gen- 
llevvomen of the court to write good poetry, that the art 
may become vulgar for all Englishmen's use," and the 
phrase marks the interest now taken in poetry by the 
highest society in England. Sidney himself joined in 
this critical movement. His Apology for Foetrie, the 
style of which is much more hke prose than that of his 
Arcadia, defended against Stephen Gosson's School oj 
Abuse in which poetry and plays were attacked from the 
Puritan point of view, the nobler uses of poetry. But 
he, with his contemporary, Gabriel Harvey, was so en- 
thralled by the classical traditions that he also defended 
the "unities" and attacked all mixture of tragedy and 
comedy, that is, he supported all that Shakespeare was 
destined to violate. The Defence of Rhyme, written 
much later by Samuel Daniel, and which finally destroyed 
the attempt to bring classical metres into our poetry; 
and also Campion's effort, in his Observations, in favour 
of rhymeless verse, must be mentioned here. Their 
matter belongs to this time. 

65. Later Prose Literature. — (i.) Theological Litera- 
ture remained for some years after 1580 only a literature 
of pamphlets. Puritanism, in its attack on the stage, 
and in the Martin Marprelate controversy upon episcopal 
government in the Church, flooded England with small 
books. Lord Bacon even joined in the latter contro- 
versy, and Nash the dramatist made himself famous in 
the war by the vigour and fierceness of his wit. Period- 
ical writing was, as it were, started on its course. Over 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE IO9 

this troubled and multitudinous sea rose at last the 
stately work of Richard Hooker. It was in 1594 tha ■ 
the first four books of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 
a defence of the Church against the Puritans, were given 
to the world. Before his death he finished the other 
four. The book has remained ever since a standard 
work. It is as much moral and political as theological. 
Its style is grave, clear, and often musical. He adorned 
it with the figures of poetry, but he used them with 
temperance, and the grand and rolling rhetoric with 
which he often concludes an argument is kept for its 
right place. On the whole, it is the first monument of 
splendid literary prose that we possess. 

(2.) We may place beside it, as other great prose of 
Elizabeth's later time, the development of The Essay in 
Lord Bacon's Essays, 1597, and Ben Jonson's Dis- 
coveries, pubhshed after his death. The highest literary 
merit of Bacon's Essays is their combination of charm 
and of poetic prose with conciseness of expression and 
fulness of thought. But the oratorical and ideal manner 
in which, with his variety, he sometimes wrote, is best 
seen in his New Atlantis, that imaginary land in the 
unreachable seas. 

(3.) The Literature of Travel ^^Nd^^ carried on by the 
publication in 1589 of Hakluyt's Navigation, Voyages, 
and Discoveries of the English Nation. The influence of 
a compilation of this kind, containing the great deeds of 
the English on the seas, has been felt ever since in the 
literature of fiction and poetry. 



no ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

(4.) In the Tales, which poured out hke a flood from 
the "university wits," from such men as Peele, and 
Lodge, and Greene, we find the origin of EngUsh fiction, 
and the subjects of many of our plays ; while the fan- 
tastic desire to revive the practices of chivalry which was 
expressed in the Arcadia, found food in the continuous 
translation of romances, chiefly of the Charlemagne 
cycle, but now more from Spain than from France ; and 
in the reading of the Italian poets, Boiardo, Tasso, and 
Ariosto, who supplied a crowd of our books with the 
machinery of magic, and with conventional descriptions 
of nature and of women's beauty. 

66. Edmund Spenser. — The later Elizabethan poetry 
begins with the Shepheards Calendar of Spenser. 
Spenser was born in London in 1552, and educated at 
the Merchant Taylors' Grammar School, which he left 
for Cambridge in April, 1569. There seems to be evi- 
dence that in this year the Sonnets of Petrarca and the 
Visions of Bellay afterwards published in 1591, were 
written by him for a miscellany of verse and prose issued 
by Van der Noodt, a refugee Flemish physician. At 
sixteen or seventeen, then, he began hterary work. At 
college Gabriel Harvey, a scholar and critic, and the 
Hobbinoll of Spenser's works, and Edward Kirke, the 
E. K. of the Shepheards Calendar, were his friends. In 
1576 he took his degree of M.A., and before he returned 
to London spent some time in the wilds of Lancashire, 
where he fell in love with the " Rosalind " of his poetry, 
a " fair widowe's daughter of the glen." His love was 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE III 

not returned, a rival interfered, but he clung fast until 
his marriage to this early passion. His disappointment 
drove him to the South, and there, 1579, he was made 
known through Leicester to Leicester's nephew, Philip 
Sidney. With him, and perhaps at Penshurst, the Shep- 
heards Calendar ' was finished for the press, and the 
Faerie Queene conceived. The publication of the for- 
mer work, 1579, made Spenser the first poet of the day, 
and so fresh and musical, and so abundant in new life 
were its twelve eclogues, that men felt that at last Eng- 
land had given birth to a poet as original, and with as 
much metrical art as Chaucer. Each month of the year 
had its own eclogue ; some were concerned with his 
shattered love, two of them were fables, three of them 
satires on the lazy clergy ; one was devoted to fair Eliza's 
praise : one, the Oak and the Briar, prophesies his 
mastery over allegory. The others belong to rustic 
shepherd life. The English of Chaucer is imitated, but 
the work is full of a new spirit, and as Spenser had begun 
with translating Petrarca, so here, in two of the eclogues, 
he imitates Clement Marot. The " Puritanism " of the 
poem is the same as that of the Faerie Queene which he 
now began to compose. Save in abhorrence of Rome, 
Spenser does not share in the pohtics of Puritanism. 
Nor does he separate himself from the world. He is as 
much at home in society and with the arts as any literary 
courtier of the day. He was Puritan in his attack on the 
sloth and pomp of the clergy ; but his moral ideal, built 
up, as it was, out of Christianity and Platoni'sm, rose fai 
above the narrower ideal of Puritanism. 



r liZ ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

In the next year, 1580, he went to Ireland with Lord 
Grey of Wilton as secretary, and afterwards saw and 
learnt that condition of things which he described in his 
View of the Present State of Irelmid. He was made 
Clerk of Degrees in the Court of Chancery in 1581, and 
Clerk of the Council of Munster in 1586, and it was then 
that the manor and castle of Kilcolman were granted to 
him. Here, at the foot of the Galtees, and bordered to 
the north by the wild country, the scenery of which is 
frequently painted in the Faerie Queene, and in whose 
woods and savage places such adventures constantly took 
place in the service of Elizabeth as are recorded in the 
Faei'ie Queene, the first three books of that great poem 
were finished. 

67. The Faerie Queene. — The plan of the poem is 
described in Spenser's prefatory letter to Raleigh. The 
twelve books were to tell the warfare of twelve Knights, 
in whom twelve virtues were represented. They are 
sent forth from the court of Gloriana," Queen of Fairy- 
land, and their warfare is against the vices and errors, im- 
personated, which opposed those virtues. In Arthur, the 
Prince, the Magnificence of the whole of virtue is repre- 
sented, and he was at last to unite himself in marriage to 
the Faerie Queene, that divine glory of God to which all 
human act and thought aspired. Six books of this plan 
were finished ; the legends of Holiness, Temperance, and 
Chastity, of Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. The two 
posthumous cantos on Mutability seem to have been part 
of a seventh legend, on Constancy, and their splendid 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE II 3 

work makes us the more regret that the story of the 
poem being finished is not true. Alongside of the spirit- 
ual allegory is the historical one, in which Elizabeth is 
Gloriana, and Mary of Scotland Duessa ; and Leicester, 
and at times Sidney, Prince Arthur, and Lord Grey is 
Arthegall, and Raleigh Timias, and Philip 11. the Soldan, 
or Grantorto. In the midst, other allegories slip in, re- 
ferring to events of the day, and Ehzabeth becomes 
Belphoebe and Britomart, and Mary is Radegund, and 
Sidney is Calidore, and Alen^on is Braggadochio. At 
least, these are considered probable attributions. The 
dreadful " justice " done in Ireland, by the " iron man," 
and the wars in Belgium, and Norfolk's conspiracy, and 
the Armada, and the trial of Mary are also shadowed 
forth. 

The allegory is clear in the first two books. After- 
wards it is troubled with digressions, sub-allegories, gene- 
alogies, with anything that Spenser's fancy led him to 
introduce. Stories are dropt and never taken up again, 
and the whole tale is so tangled that it loses the interest 
of narrative. But it retains the interest of exquisite alle- 
gory. It is the poem of the noble powers of the human 
soul struggling towards union with God, and warring 
against all the forms of evil ; and these powers become 
real personages, whose lives and battles Spenser tells in 
verse so musical and so gliding, so delicately wrought, so 
rich in imaginative ornament, and so inspired with the 
finer hfe of beauty, that he has been called the poets' 
Poet. But he is the poet of all men who love poetry. 



114 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Descriptions like those of the House of Pride and the 
Mask of Cupid, and of the Months, are so vivid in form 
and colour, that they have always made subjects for 
artists; while the allegorical personages are, to the very 
last detail, wrought out by an imagination which de- 
scribes not only the general character, but the special 
characteristics of the Virtues or the Vices, of the Months 
of the year, or of the Rivers of England. In its ideal 
whole, the poem represents the new love of chivalry, 
of classical learning; the delight in mystic theories of 
love and religion, in allegorical schemes, in splendid 
spectacles and pageants, in wild adventure ; the love of 
England, the hatred of Spain, the strange worship of the 
queen, even Spenser's own new love. It takes up and 
uses the popular legends of fairies, dwarfs, and giants, all 
the recovered romance and machinery of the Italian 
epics, and mingles them up with the wild scenery of 
Ireland, with the savages and wonders of the New World. 
Almost the whole spirit of the Renaissance under Eliza- 
beth, except its coarser and baser elements, is in its 
pages. Of anything impure, or ugly, or violent, there 
is no trace. And Spenser adds to all his own sacred 
love of love, his own pre-eminent sense of the loveliness 
of loveliness, walking through the whole of this woven 
world of faerie — 

" With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace." 

The first three books were finished in Ireland, and 
Raleigh listened to them in 1589 at Kilcolman Castle, 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE II 5 

among the alder shades of the river Mulla that fed the 
lake below the castle. DeHghted with the poem, he 
brought Spenser to England, and the queen, the court, 
and the whole of England soon shared in Raleigh's 
delight. It was the first great ideal poem that England 
had produced ; it places him side by side with Milton, 
but on a throne built of wholly different material. It has 
never ceased to make poets, and it will live, as he said 
in his dedication to the queen, " with the eternitie of her 
fame." 

68. Spenser's Minor Poems. — The next year, 1591, 
Spenser, being still in England, collected his smaller 
poems, most of which seem to be early work, and 
published them. Among them Mother Hubberd's Tale 
is a remarkable satire, somewhat in the manner of 
Chaucer, on society, on the evils of a beggar soldiery, of 
the Church, of the court, and of misgovernment. The 
Ruins of Time, and still more the Tears of the Muses, 
support the statement that Hterature was looked on coldly 
previous to 1580. Sidney had died in 1586, and three of 
these poems bemoan his death. The others are of slight 
importance, and the whole collection was entitled Com- 
plaints. His Daphnaida seems to have also appeared in 
1 5 91. Returning to Ireland, he gave an account of his 
visit and of the court of Elizabeth in Colin Clout's come 
Borne again, and at last, after more than a year's pursuit, 
won, in 1594, his second love for his wife, and found with 
her perfect happiness. A long series of lovely " Sonnets " 
•^ the Amoretti, records the progress of his wooing ; and 



fl6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the Epithalamion, his exultant marriage hymn, is the most 
glorious love-song in the English tongue. These three 
were published in 1595. At the close of 1595 he brought 
to England in a second visit the last three books of the 
Faerie Queene. The next year he spent in London, and 
published these books, as well as the Prothalamion on 
the marriage of Lord Worcester's daughters, the Hymns 
on Love and Beauty and on Heavenly Love and Beauty. 
The two first hymns were rapturously written in his 
youth; the two others, now written, and with even 
greater rapture, enshrine that love philosophy of Petrarca 
which makes earthly love a ladder to the love of God. 
The close of his life was sorrowful. In 1598, Tyrone's 
rebellion drove him out of Ireland. Kilcolman was 
sacked and burnt, one of his children perished in the 
flames, and Spenser and his family fled for their lives to 
England. Broken-hearted, poor, but not forgotten, the 
poet died in a London tavern. All his fellows went with 
his body to the grave, where, close by Chaucer, he lies in 
Westminster Abbey. London, " his most kindly nurse," 
takes care also of his dust, and England keeps him in 
her love. 

69. Later Elizabethan Poetry : Translations. — There 
are three translators that take literary rank among the 
crowd that carried on the work of the earlier time. Two 
mark the influence of Italy, one the more powerful influ- 
ence of the Greek spirit. Sir John Harington in 1591 
translated Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Fairfax in 1600 
translated Tdisso's Jerusalem, and his book is " one of the 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE I17 

glories of Elizabeth's reign." But the noblest translation 
is that of Homer's whole work by George Chapman, the 
dramatist, the first part of which appeared in 1598. The 
vivid life and energy of the time, its creative power and 
its force, are expressed in this poem, which is " more an 
EHzabethan tale written about Achilles and Ulysses " 
than a translation. The rushing gallop of the long four- 
teen-syllable stanza in which it is written has the fire and 
swiftness of Homer, but it has not his directness or dig- 
nity. Its " inconquerable quaintness" and diffuseness 
are wholly unlike the pure form and hght and measure ol 
Greek work. But it is a distinct poem of such power 
that it will excite and delight all lovers of poetry, as it 
excited and delighted Keats. John Florio's Ti-anslation 
of the Essays of Montaigne, 1603, and North's Plutarch, 
are also, though in prose, to be mentioned here, because 
Shakespeare used the books, and because we must mark 
Montaigne's influence on EngHsh hterature even before 
his retranslation by Charles Cotton. 

70. The Four Phases of Poetry after 1579. — Spenser 
reflected in his poems the romantic spirit of the Enghsh 
Renaissance. The other poetry of Elizabeth's reign 
reflected the whole of Enghsh Life. The best way to 
arrange it — omitting as yet the Drama — is in an order 
parallel to the growth of the national life, and the proof 
that it is the best way is, that on the whole such an his- 
torical order is a true chronological order. First, then, 
if we compare England after 1580, as writers have often 
done, to an ardent youth, we shall find in the poetry of 



ri8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the first years that followed that date all the elements of 
youth. It is a poetry of love, and romance, and imag- 
ination, — of Romeo and Juliet. Secondly, and later on, 
when Englishmen grew older in feeling, their enthusiasm, 
which had flitted here and there in action and literature 
over all kinds of subjects, settled down into a steady 
enthusiasm for England itself. The country entered on 
its early manhood, and parallel with this there is the 
great outbreak of historical plays, and a set of poets whom 
I will call the Patriotic Poets. Thirdly, and later still, 
the fire and strength of the people, becoming inward, 
resulted in a graver and more thoughtful national life, 
and parallel with this are the tragedies of Shakespeare 
and the poets who have been called philosophical. 
These three classes of poets overlapped one another, 
and grew up gradually, but on the whole their succes- 
sion is the image of a real succession of national thought 
and emotion. 

k fourth and separate phase does not represent, as these 
do, a new national Hfe, a new religion, and new politics, 
but the despairing struggle of the old faith against the 
new. There were numbers of men, such as Wordsworth 
has finely sketched in old Norton in the Doe of Rylstone, 
who vainly and sorrowfully strove against all the new 
national elements. Robert Southwell, of Norfolk, a 
Jesuit priest, was the poet of Roman Catholic England. 
Imprisoned for three years, racked ten times, and finally 
executed, he wrote, while confessor to Lady Arundel, a 
number of poems pubHshed at various intervals, and 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE ITQ 

finally collected under the title, S^. Peter's Complaint^ 
Mary Magdalen's Tears, with other works of the Author, 
R.S. The Mceonice, and a short prose work Marie Mag- 
dalen's Funerall Tears, became also very popular. It 
marks not only the large Roman CathoKc element in the 
country, but also the strange contrasts of the time that 
eleven editions of books with these titles were published 
between 1595 and 1609, at a time when, the Venus and 
Adonis of Shakespeare led the way for a multitude of 
poems — following on Marlowe's Hero and Leander and 
Lodge's Glaucus and Scylla — which sang devotedly of 
love and amorous joy. 

71. The Love Poetry. — I have called it by this name 
because all its best work is almost limited to that subject 
— the subject of youth. The Love sonnets, written in 
a series, are a feature of the time. The best are Sidney's 
Astrophel and Stella, Daniel's Delia, Constable's Diana, 
Drayton's Idea, Spenser's Amoretti, and Shakespeare's 
Sonnets. More than twelve collections of these love 
sonnets, each dedicated to one lady, and often a hun- 
dred in number, were published between 1593 and 1596, 
and these had been preceded by many others. 

The Miscellanies, to which I have already alluded, 
and the best of which were The Passionate Pilgrim, 
England's Helicon, and Davison's Rhapsody^ were 
scarcely less numerous than the Song-books published 
with music, full of delightful lyrics. The wonder is that 
the lyrical level in such a multitude of short poems is 
so high throughout. Some songs reach a first-rate ex- 



I20 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

cellence, but even the least good have the surprising 
spirit of poetry in them. The best of them are " old 
and plain, and dallying with the innocence of love," 
childlike in their natural sweetness and freshness, but 
full also of a southern ardour of passion. Shakespeare's 
excel the others in their gay rejoicing, their nnn reality, 
their exquisite ease, and when in the plays, gain a 
new beauty from their fitness to their dramatic place. 
Others possess a quaint pastoralism like shepherd life 
in porcelain, such as Marlowe's well-known song, " Come 
live with me, and be my love ; " others a splendour of 
love and beauty as in Lodge's So7ig of Rosaline, and 
Spenser's on his marriage. To specialise the various 
kinds would be too long, for there never was in our 
land a richer outburst of lyrical ravishment and fancy. 
England was like a grove in spring, full of birds in 
revel and solace. Love poems of a longer kind were 
also made, such as Marlowe's Hero and Leander, the 
Vemcs and Ado7iis and, if we may date them here, the 
Elegies of John Donne. I mention only a few of these 
poems, the mark of which is a luscious sensuousness. 
There were also religious poems, the reflection of the 
Puritan and Church elements in English society. They 
were collected under such titles as the Handful of 
Honeysnckles, the Poor Widow's Mite, Psalms and 
Sonnets, and there are some good things among them 
written by William Hunnis. 

72. The Patriotic Poets. — Among all this poetry of 
Romance, Religion, and Love, rose a poetry which 



tv THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 121 

devoted itself to the glory of England. It was chiefly 
historical, and as it may be said to have had its germ 
in the Mii'ror for Magistrates, so it had its perfect 
flower in the historical dramas of Shakespeare. Men 
had now begun to have a great pride in England. She 
had stepped into the foremost rank, had outwitted 
France, subdued internal foes, beaten and humbled 
Spain on every sea. Hence the history of the land 
became precious, and the very rivers, hills, and plains 
honourable, and to be sung and praised in verse. This 
poetic impulse is best represented in the works of three 
men — Willia:\i Warner, Samuel Daniel, and Michael 
Dr-\yton. Born within a few years of each other, about 
1560, they all lived beyond the century, and the national 
poetry they set on foot lasted when the romantic poetry 
lost its wealth and splendour. 

William Warner's great book was Albioii^s England, 
1586, a history of England in fourteen-syllable verse 
from the Deluge to Queen Elizabeth. It is clever, 
humorous, now grave, now gay, crowded with stories, 
and runs to 10,000 hues. Its popularity was great, 
and the English in which it was written deserved it. 
Such stories in it as Argentile and Ctiran, and the 
Patient Countess, prove Warner to have had a true, 
pathetic vein of poetry. His English is not however so 
good as that of " well-languaged Daniel," who, among 
tragedies and pastoral comedies, the noble series of 
sonnets to Deha and poems of pure fancy, wrote The 
Complaint of Rosamoiid, far more poetical than his 



122 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Steadier, even prosaic Civil Wars of York and Lan- 
caster. Spenser saw in him a new " shepherd of poetry 
who did far surpass the rest," and Coleridge says that 
the style of his Hymen's Triumph may be declared 
*' imperishable English." Of the three the easiest poet 
was Drayton. The Ba7'ons^ Wars, England's Heroical 
Epistles, 1597, The Miseries of Queen Margaret, and 
Four Legends, together with the brilhant Ballad of 
Agincourt prove his patriotic fervour. Not content with 
these, he set himself to glorify the whole of his land in 
the Polyolbion, thirty books, and nearly 100,000 lines. 
It is a description in Alexandrines of the "tracts, 
mountains, forests, and other parts of this renowned 
isle of Britain, with intermixture of the most remark- 
able stories, antiquities, wonders, pleasures, and com- 
modities of the same, digested into a poem." It was 
not a success, though it deserved success. Its great 
length was against it, but the real reason was that this 
kind of poetry had had its day. It appeared in 16 13, 
in James I.'s reign. He, as well as Daniel, did other 
work. Indeed Drayton is a striking instance of the way 
in which these divisions, which I have made for the sake 
of a general order, overlapped one another. He is as 
much the love poet as the patriotic poet in his eclogues 
of 1593 and in his later Idea; he is also a religious, a 
satirical, a lyrical, and a fairy poet. He plays on every 
kind of harp. 

73. Philosophical Poets. — Before the date of the 
Polyolbion a change had come. As the patriotic poets 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 1 23 

on the whole came after the romantic, so the patriotic, 
on the whole, were followed by the philosophical poets. 
The land was settled ; enterprise ceased to be the first 
thing ; men sat down to think, and in poetry questions 
of rehgious and political philosophy were treated with 
" sententious reasoning, grave, subtle, and condensed." 
Shakespeare, in his passage from comedy to tragedy, in 
1 601, illustrates this change. The two poets who best 
represent it are Sir Jno. Davies and Fulke Greville, 
Lord Brooke. In Davies himself we find an instance of 
it. His earlier poem of the Orchestra, 1596, in which 
the whole world is explained as a dance, is as exultant 
as Spenser. His later poem, 1599, is compact and vig- 
orous reasoning, for the most part without fancy. Its 
very title, Nosce te ipsum — Know Thyself — and its 
divisions, i. "On humane learning," 2. "The immor- 
tality of the soul" — mark the alteration. Two little 
poems, one of Bacon's, on the Life of Man, as a bubble, 
and one of Sir Henry Wotton's, on the Character of a 
Happy Life, are instances of the same change. It is still 
more marked in Lord Brooke's long, obscure poems On 
Human Learning, oji Wars, on Monarchy, and on Relig- 
ion. They are political and historical treatises, not 
poems, and all in them, said Lamb, " is made frozen 
and rigid by intellect." Apart from poetry, "they are 
worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit 
on political science which was to produce the riper 
speculations of Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke." 
Brooke too, in a happier mood, was a lyrist ; and his 



124 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

collection, Ccslica, has some of the graces of love and 
its imagination. 

74. Satirical Poetry, which lives best when imaginative 
creation begins to decay, arose also towards the end of 
Elizabeth's reign. It had been touched in the begin- 
ning before Spenser by Gascoigne's Steele Glas, but had 
no further growth save in prose until 1593, when John 
Donne is supposed to have written some of his Satires. 
Thomas Lodge, Joseph Hall, John Marston, wrote satir- 
ical poem.s in the last part of the sixteenth century. 
These satires are all written in a rugged, broken style, 
supposed to be the proper style for satire. Donne's are 
the best, and are so because he was a true poet. Though 
his work was mostly done in the reign of James I., and 
though his poetical reputation, and his influence (which 
was very great) did not reach their height till after the 
publication in 1633 of all his poems, he really belongs, 
by dint of his youthful sensuousness, of his imaginative 
flame, and of his sad and powerful thought, to the Eliza- 
bethans. So also does William Drummond, of Haw- 
thornden, whose work was done in the reign of James L, 
and whose name is Hnked by poetry and friendship to 
Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Both are the 
result of the Elizabethan influence extending to Scotland. 
Drummond's sonnets and madrigals have some of the 
grace of Sidney, and he rose at intervals into grave and 
noble verse, as in his sonnet on John the Baptist. We 
turn now to the drama, which in this age grew into 
magnificence. 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 125 



THE DRAMA 

75. Early Dramatic Representation in England. — 

The English Drama grew up through the Mystery and 
the Miracle play, the Morality and the Interlude, the 
rude farce of the strolling players and the pageant. 
The Mystery was the representation (at first in or near 
the Church, and by the clergy ; and then in the towns, 
and by the laity) of the events of the Old and New 
Testaments which bore on the Fall and the Redemption 
of Man. The Miracle play, though distinct elsewhere 
from the Mystery, was the common name of both in 
England, and was the representation of some legendary 
story of a saint or martyr. These stories gave more 
freedom of speech, a more worldly note, and a greater 
range of characters to the mystery plays. They also 
supplied a larger opportunity for the comic element. The 
Miracle plays of England fell before long into two classes, 
represented at the feasts of Christmas Day and Easter 
Day; and about 1262 the town-guilds took them into 
their hands. At Christmas the Birth of Christ was rep- 
resented, and the events which made it necessary, back 
to the Fall of Man. At Easter the Passion was repre- 
sented in every detail up to the Ascension, and the play 
often began with the raising of Lazarus. Sometimes even 
the Baptism was brought in, and finally, the Last Judg- 
ment was added to the double series, which thus em- 
braced the whole history of man from the creation to the 
close. About the beginning of the fourteenth century 



126 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

these two series were brought together into one, and 
acted on Corpus Christi Day on a great moveable stage 
in the open spaces of the towns. The whole series con- 
sisted of a number of short plays written frequently by 
different authors, and each guild took the play which 
suited it best. In a short time, there was scarcely a 
town of any importance in England from Newcastle to 
Exeter which had not its Corpus Christi play, and the 
representations lasted from one day to eight days. Of 
these sets of plays we possess the Towneley plays, 32 in 
all, those of York, 48 in all, those of Chester, 24 in all, 
and a casual collection, called of Coventry, of later and 
unconnected plays. Of course, these sets only represent 
a small portion of the Miracle plays of England. It is 
not improbable that every httle town had its own maker 
of them. Any play that pleased was carried from the 
town to the castle, from the castle, it may be, to the 
court. The castle chaplain sometimes composed them : 
the king kept players of them and scenery for them. 
On the whole this irregular drama lasted, if we take in 
its Anglo-Norman beginnings in French and Latin, for 
nearly 500 years, from mo, when we first hear at St. 
Albans of the Miracle play of St. Catherine, to the reign 
of Henry III., when The Harrowing of Hell, our first 
extant religious drama in Enghsh, was acted, and then 
to 1580, when we last hear of the representation of a 
Miracle play at Coventry. 

76. Separate plays preceded and existed alongside 
of these large series. Not only on the days of Christ- 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 12/ 

mas, Easter, and Corpus Christi were plays acted, but 
plays were made for separate feasts, saints' days, and 
the turns of the year, and these had the character of 
the counties where they were made. The villages took 
them up, and soon began to ask for secular as well as 
religious representations at their fairs and merry-mak- 
ings. The strolling players answered the demand, and 
secular subjects began to be treated with romantic or 
comic aims, and with some closeness to natural life. 
We have a play about Robin Hood of the sixteenth 
century, acted on May Day; the Play of St. George; 
the Play of the Wake on St. John's Eve. Some of the 
farcical parts of the Miracle plays, isolated from the 
rest, were acted, and we have a dramatic fragment 
taken from the very secular romance of Dame Siriz, 
which dates from the time of Edward I. We may be 
sure it was not the only one. 

77. The Morality begins as we come to the reign 
of Edward III. We hear of the Play of the Pater- 
noster, and of one of its series, the Play of Laziness, 
But the oldest extant are of the time of Henry VI. 
The Castle of Constancy ; Humanity ; Spirit, Will, and 
Understanding — these titles partly explain what the 
Morality was. It was a play in which the characters 
were the Vices and Virtues, with the addition after- 
wards of allegorical personages, such as Riches, Good 
Deeds, Confession, Death, and any human condition or 
quahty needed for the play. These characters were 
brought together in a rough story, at the end of whicb 



128 ^ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Virtue triumphed, or some moral principle was estab- 
lished. The later dramatic fool grew up in the Moral- 
ities out of a personage called "The Vice," and the 
humorous element was introduced by the retaining of 
"The Devil" from the Miracle play and by making 
The Vice torment him. We draw nearer then in the 
Morality to the regular drama. Its story had to be 
invented, a proper plot had to be conceived, a clear 
end fixed upon, to produce which the allegorical char- 
acters acted on one another. We are on the very 
verge of the natural drama ; and so close was the 
relation that the acting of Moralities did not die out 
till about the end of Elizabeth's reign. A certain tran- 
sition to the regular drama may be observed in them 
when historical characters, celebrated for a virtue or 
vice, were introduced instead of the virtue or the 
vice, as when Aristides took the place of Justice. 
Moreover, as the heat of the struggle of the Reforma- 
tion increased, the Morality was used to support a side. 
Real men and women were shown under the thin cloaks 
of its allegorical characters. The stage was becoming a 
living power when this began. 

78. The Interludes must next be noticed. There had 
been interludes in the Miracle plays, short, humorous 
pieces, interpolated for the amusement of the people. 
These were continued in the Moralities, and were made 
closer still to popular life. It occurred to John Hey- 
wooD to identify himself with this form of drama, and to 
raise the Interludes into a place in literature. In his 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA ^ I29 

hands, from 1520 to 1540, the Interkide became a kind 
of farce, and he wrote several for the amusement of the 
court of Henry VIII. He drew the characters from real 
life ; in many cases he gave them the names of men and 
women, but he retained " the Vice " as a personage. 

79. The Regular Drama: its First Stage. — These 
were the beginnings of the English Drama. To trace 
the many and various windings of the way from the 
Interludes of Hey wood to the regular drama of Elizabeth 
were too long and too involved a work for this book. 
We need only say that the first pure EngHsh comedy 
was,i?<3!/^A Roister Doister, written by Nicholas Udall, 
master of Eton, known to have been acted before 155 1, 
but not published till 1566. It is our earliest picture of 
London manners ; it is divided into regular acts and 
scenes, and is made in rhyme. The first English tragedy 
is Gorboduc^ or Ferrex and Pon^ex, written by Sackville 
and Norton, and represented in 156 1. The story was 
taken from British legend ; the method followed that of 
Seneca. A few tragedies on the same classical model fol- 
lowed, but before long this classical type of plays died out. 

For twenty years or so, from 1560 to 1580, the drama 
was learning its way by experiments. Moralities were 
still made, comedies, tragi-comedies, farces, tragedies ; 
and sometimes tragedy, farce, comedy, and morality were 
rolled into one play. The verse of the drama was as 
unsettled as its form. The plays were written in dog- 
gerel, in the fourteen-syllable line, in prose, and in a ten- 
syllable verse, and these were sometimes mixed in the 

K 



130 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP, 

same play. They were acted chiefly at the Universities, 
the Inns of Court, the Court, and after 1576 by players 
in the theatres. Out of this confusion arose 1580-8 
(i) two sets of dramatic writers, the "University Wits" 
and the theatrical playwrights; (2) a distinct dramatic 
verse, the blank verse destined to be used by Marlowe, 
Peele, and Greene ; and (3) the licensed theatre. 

80. The Theatre. — A patent was given in 1574 to 
the Earl of Leicester's servants to act plays in any town 
in England, and they built in 1576 the Blackfriars Thea- 
tre. In the same year two others were set up in the 
fields about Shoreditch — " The Theatre" and "The 
Curtain." The Globe Theatre, built for Shakespeare 
and his fellows in 1599, may stand as a type of the rest. 
In the form of a hexagon outside, it was circular within, 
and open to the weather, except above the stage. The 
play began at three o'clock; the nobles and ladies sat 
in boxes or in stools on the stage, the people stood in 
the pit or yard. The stage itself, strewn with rushes, 
was a naked room, with a blanket for a curtain. Wooden 
imitations of animals, towers, woods, houses, were all the 
scenery used, and a board, stating the place of action, 
was hung out from the top when the scene changed. 
Boys acted the female parts. It was only after the 
Restoration that movable scenery and actresses were 
introduced. No " pencil's aid " supplied the landscape 
of Shakespeare's plays. The forest of Arden, the castle 
of Macbeth, were " seen only by the intellectual eye." 

81. The Second Stage of the Drama ranges from 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I3I 

1580 to 1596. It includes the plays of Lyly, Peele, 
Greene, Lodge, Marlowe, Kyd, Nash, and the earliest 
works of Shakespeare. During this time we know that 
more than 100 different plays were performed by four 
out of the eleven companies ; so swift and plentiful was 
their production. They were written in prose, and in 
rhyme, and in blank verse mixed with prose and rhyme. 
Prose and rhyme prevailed before 1587, when Marlowe 
in his play of Tamburlaine made blank verse so new 
and splendid a thing that it overcame all other dra- 
matic vehicles. John Lyly, however, wrote so much of 
his eight plays in prose, that he established, we may say, 
the use of prose in the drama — an innovation which 
Gascoigne introduced, and which Shakespeare carried 
to perfection. Some beautiful httle songs scattered 
through Lyly's plays are the forerunners of the songs 
with which Shakespeare and his fellows illumined their 
dramas, and the witty " quips and cranks," repartees 
and similes of Lyly's fantastic prose dialogue were the 
school of Shakespeare's first prose dialogue. Peele, 
Greene, and Marlowe, the three important names of 
the period, belong to the University men. So do Lodge 
and Nash, and perhaps Kyd. They are the first in 
whose hands the play of human passion and action is 
expressed with any true dramatic effect. George 
Peele's Arraignment of Paris, 1584, and his David 
and Bethsabe are full of passages of new and delightful 
poetry, and when the poetry is good, his blank verse 
and his heroic couplet are smooth and tender. Robert 



132 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

Greene, of whose prose in pamphlet and tale much 
might be said, spent ten years in writing, and died in 
1592. There is little poetry in his plays, but he could 
write a charming song. Kyd's best play is the Spa7iish 
Tragedy. None of these men had the power of work- 
ing out a play by the development of their " characters " 
to a natural conclusion. They anticipate the poetry, 
but not the art, of Shakespeare. Christopher Marlowe 
as dramatist surpassed, as poet rose far above, them, 
and as metrist is almost as great as Shakespeare. The 
difference between the unequal action and thought of 
his Doctor Faustus, and the quiet and orderly progres- 
sion to its end of the play of Edward II., is all the more 
remarkable when we know that he died at thirty. As 
he may be said to have made the verse of the drama, so 
he created the English tragic drama. His best plays 
are wrought with a new skill to their end, his characters 
are outlined with strength and developed with fire. 
Each play illustrates one ruling passion, in its growth, 
its power, and its extremes. Tambuidaine paints the 
desire of universal empire ; the Jew of Malta, the mar- 
ried passions of greed and hatred; Doctor Faustus, the 
struggle and failure of man to possess all knowledge and 
all pleasure without toil and without law ; Edward II., the 
misery of weakness and the agony of a king's ruin. His 
knowledge of human nature was neither extensive nor 
penetrative, but the splendour of his imagination, and 
the noble surging of his verse, make us forget his want 
of depth and of variety. Every one has dwelt on his 



tV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 1^^ 

intemperance in phrases and of images, but the spirit ot 
poetry moves in them ; we even enjoy the natural faults 
of fiery youth in a fiery time. He had no humour, and 
his farcical fun is like the boisterous play of a clumsy 
animal. In nothing is the difference between Shake- 
speare and huTi and his fellows more infinite than in this 
point of humour. And indeed he had little pathos. 
His sorrows are too loud. Nevertheless, by force of 
poetry, not of dramatic art, Marlowe made a noble 
porch to the temple which Shakespeare built. That tem- 
ple, however, in spite of all the preceding work, seems to 
spring out of nothing, so astonishing it is in art, in 
beauty, in conception. He himself was his only worthy 
predecessor, and f/ie third stage of the drama includes 
his work, that of Ben Jonson's, and of a few others. It 
is the work, moreover, not of University men who did 
not know the stage, but of men who were not only men 
of genius, but also playwrights who understood what a 
play should be, and how it was to be staged. 

82. William Shakespeare in twenty-eight years made 
the drama represent almost the whole of human life. He 
was baptised April 26, 1564, and was the son of a com- 
fortable burgess of Stratford-on-Avon. While he was 
still young his father fell into poverty, and an interrupted 
education left him an inferior scholar. " He had small 
Latin and less Greek ; " but he had avast store of Enghsh.^ 

1 He uses 15,000 words, and he wrote pure English. Out of every 
five verbs, adverbs, and nouns {e.g. in the lust act of Othello^, four are 
Teutonic ; and he is more Teutonic in comedy than in tragedy. 



134 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

However, by dint of genius and by living in a society 
in which every kind of information was attainable, he 
became an accompHshed man. The story told of his 
deer-steaUng in Charlecote woods is without proof, but 
it is likely that his youth was wild and passionate. At 
nineteen he married Anne Hathaway, more than seven 
years older than himself, and was probably unhappywith 
her. For this reason, or from poverty, or from the driv- 
ing of the genius that led him to the stage, he left Strat- 
ford about 1586-7, and came to London at the age of 
twenty-two years, and falling in with Marlowe, Greene, 
and the rest, became an actor and playwright, and may 
have lived their unrestrained and riotous life for some 
years. It is convenient to divide his work into periods, 
and to state the order in which it is now supposed his 
plays were written. But we must not imagine that the 
periods and the order are really settled. We know some- 
thing, but not all we ought to know, of this matter. 

83. His First Period. — It is probable that before 
leaving Stratford he had sketched a part at least of his 
Venics and Adonis. It is full of the country sights and 
sounds, of the ways of birds and animals, such as he saw 
when wandering in Charlecote woods. Its rich and over- 
laden poetry and its warm colouring made him, when it 
was pubhshed, 1593, at once the favourite of men like 
Lord Southampton, and hfted him into fame. But before 
that date he had done work for the stage by touching up 
old plays, and writing new ones. We seem to trace his 
" prentice hand " in some dramas of the time, but the 



rv THE ENGLISH DRAMA 135 

first he is usually thought to have fully retouched is Ti- 
tus Andronicus, and some time after the First Part o) 
Henry VI. Love's Labour'' s Lost, supposed to be written 
1589 or 1590, the first of his original plays, in which he 
quizzed and excelled the Euphuists in wit, was followed 
by the involved and rapid farce of the Comedy of Errors. 
Out of these froHcs of intellect and action he passed 
into pure poetry in the Midsummer Nighfs Dream, and 
mingled into fantastic beauty the classic legend, the 
mediaeval fairyland, and the clownish life of the English 
mechanic. Italian story laid its charm upon him about 
the same time, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona pre- 
ceded the southern glow of passion in Romeo and Julie t, 
in which he first reached tragic power. They are said to 
complete, with Love's Labour's Won, afterwards recast as 
Ail's Well that Ends Well, the love plays of his early 
period. We should read along with them, as belonging 
to the same period, the Rape of Lucrece, a poem finally 
printed in 1594, one year later than the Venus and Ado- 
nis, which was probably finished, if not wholly written, 
at this passionate time. 

The same poetic succession we have traced in the poets, 
is now found in Shakespeare. The patriotic feeling of 
England, also represented in Marlowe and Peele, had 
seized on him, and he began his great series of historical 
plays with Richard II. and Richard III. To introduce 
Richard III. or to complete the subject, he recast the 
Second and Third Parts of Henry VI., and ended what 
we have called his first period by King John about 1596. 



136 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

84. His Second Period, 1596-1601. — In the Merchani 
of Venice Shakespeare reached entire mastery over his 
art. A mingled woof of tragic and comic threads is 
brought to its highest point of colour when Portia and 
Shylock meet in court. Pure comedy followed in his 
retouch of the old Taming of the Shrew, and all the wit 
of the world mixed with noble history met in the first and 
second Henry IV., 1597-8; while Falstaffwas continued 
in the Merry Wives of Windsor. The historical plays 
were then closed with Henry V., 1599; a splendid dra- 
matic song to the glory of England. The Globe Theatre 
of which he was one of the proprietors, was built in 1599. 
In the comedies he wrote for it, Shakespeare turned to 
write of love again, not to touch its deeper passion as 
before, but to play with it in all its lighter phases. The 
flashing dialogue of Much Ado About Nothing was fol- 
lowed by the far-off forest world of As Yoil Like It, 1599, 
where " the time fleets carelessly," and Rosalind's char- 
acter is the play. Amid all its gracious lightness steals in 
a new element, and the melancholy of Jaques is the first 
touch we have of the older Shakespeare who had " gained 
his experience, and whose experience had made him 
sad." As yet it was but a touch ; Twelfth Night shows 
no trace of it, though the play that followed, AWs Well 
that Ends Well, 1601? again strikes a sadder note. We 
find this sadness fully grown in the later Sonnets, which 
are said to have been finished about 1602. We know 
that some of the Sonnets existed in 1598, but they were 
all printed together for the first time in 1609. They 



TV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I37 

form together the most deep, ardent, subtle, and varied 
representation of love in our language, and their emotion 
is mingled with so great a wealth of simple and complex 
thought that they seem to be written out of the experi- 
ence, not of one but of many men. 

Shakespeare's life changed now, and his mind changed 
with it. He had grown wealthy during this period, 
famous, and loved by society. He was the friend of the 
Earls of Southampton and Essex, and of William Herbert, 
Lord Pembroke. The queen patronised him ; all the 
best literary society was his own. He had rescued his 
father from poverty, bought the best house in Stratford 
and much land, and was a man of wealth and comfort. 
Suddenly all his life seems to have grown dark. His 
best friends fell into ruin, Essex perished on the scaffold, 
Southampton went to the Tower, Pembroke was banished 
from the court ; he may himself, some have thought, ha.e 
been slightly involved in the rising of Essex. Added to 
this, we may conjecture, from the imaginative pageantry 
of the sonnets, that he had unwisely loved, and been 
betrayed in his love by a dear friend. Public and pri- 
vate ill then weighed heavily upon him ; he seems to 
even have had disgust for his profession as an actor ; 
and in darkness of spirit, though still clinging to the 
business of the theatre, he passed from comedy to write 
of the sterner side of the world, to tell the tragedy of 
mankind. 

85. His Third Period, 1601-1608, begins with the 
last days of Queen Elizabeth. It opens with Julius 



138 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 

Ccesar^ and we may have, scattered through the telling 
of the great Roman's fate, the expression of Shake- 
speare's sorrow for the ruin of Essex. Hamlet followed, 
1601-3? for the poet felt, like the Prince of Denmark, 
that " the time was out of joint." Hamlety the dreamer, 
may well represent Shakespeare as he stood aside from 
the crash that overwhelmed his friends, and thought on 
the changing world. The tragi-comedy of Measure for 
Measure, 1603 ? may have now been written, and is tragic 
in thought throughout. Othello, 1604, Macbeth, Lear, 
Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, 
1608? Tinion (only in part his own), were all written in 
these five years. The darker sins of men ; the unpitying 
fate which slowly gathers round and falls on mistakes 
and crimes, on ambition, luxury, and pride ; the aveng- 
ing wrath of conscience ; the cruelty and punishment of 
weakness ; the treachery, lust, jealousy, ingratitude, mad- 
ness of men ; the folhes of the great and the fickleness 
of the mob, are all, with a thousand other varying 
moods and passions, painted, and felt as his own while 
he painted them, during this stern time. 

86. His Fourth Period, 1608-1613. — As Shakespeare 
wrote of these things he passed out of them, and his last 
days are full of the gentle and loving calm of one who 
has known sin and sorrow and fate, but has risen above 
them into peaceful victory. Like his great contemporary 
Bacon, he left the world and his own evil time behind 
him, and with the same quiet dignity sought the inno- 
cence and stillness of country life. The country breathes 



TV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 1 39 

through all the dramas of this time. The flowers Perdita 
gathers in Winter's Tale^ the frolic of the sheep-shear- 
ing, he may have seen in the Stratford meadows ; the 
song of Fidele in Cyvibeline is written by one who already 
feared no more the frown of the great, nor slander, nor 
censure rash, and was looking forward to the time when 
men should say of him — 

Quiet consummation have ; 
And renowned be thy grave ! 

Shakespeare probably left London in 1609, and lived in 
the house he had bought at Stratford-on-Avon. He was 
reconciled, it is said, to his wife, and the plays now writ- 
ten dwell on domestic peace and forgiveness. The story 
of Marina, which he left unfinished, and which it is 
supposed two later writers expanded into the play of 
Pericles, is the first of his closing series of dramas. 
Cymbeline, 1609? The Tempest, 16 10? Winter's Tale, 
bring his history up to 161 1, and in the next year he 
may have closed his poetic hfe by writing, with Fletcher, 
Henry VIII., 1 6 1 2 ? The Two Noble Kinsmen of Fletcher, 
part of which is attributed to Shakespeare, and in which 
the poet sought the inspiration of Chaucer, would belong 
to this period. For some three years he kept silence^ 
and then, on the 23d of April, 1616, it is supposed on 
his fifty-second birthday, he died. 

87. His Work. — We can only guess with regard to 
Shakespeare's life and character. It has been tried to 
find out what he was from his sonnets, and from his plays, 



f^O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA^ 

but every attempt seems to be a failure. We cannot lay 
our hand on anything and say for certain that it was 
spoken by Shakespeare out of his own personality. He 
created men and women whose dramatic action on each 
other, and towards a chosen end, was intended to please 
the public, not to reveal himself. Frequently faihng in 
fineness of workmanship, having, but far less than the 
other dramatists, the faults of the art of his time, he was 
yet in all other points — in creative power, in impassioned 
conception and execution, in truth to universal human 
nature, in intellectual power, in intensity of feeling, in 
the great matter and manner of his poetry, in the weld- 
ing together of thought, passion, and action, in range, in 
plenteousness, in the continuance of his romantic feeling 
— the greatest poet our modern world has known. Like 
the rest of the greater poets, he reflected the noble things 
of his time, but refused to reflect the base. Fully in- 
fluenced, as we see in Hamlet he was, by the graver and 
more phflosophic cast of thought of the latter time of 
EHzabeth ; passing on into the reign of James I., when 
pedantry took the place of gaiety, and sensual the place 
of imaginative love in the drama, and artificial art the 
place of that art which itself is nature; he preserves to 
the last the natural passion, the simple tenderness, the 
sweetness, grace, and fire of the youthful Elizabethan 
poetry. The Winter's Tale is as lovely a love-story as 
Ro7neo and Juliet, the Tempest is more instinct with im- 
agination and as great in fancy as ih^- Midsummer Nighfs 
Dream, and yet there are fully twenty years between 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I4I 

them. The only change is in the increase of power and 
in a closer, graver, and more ideal grasp of human nature. 
In the unchangeableness of this joyful and creative art- 
power Shakespeare is almost alone. It is true that in 
these last plays his art is more self-conscious, less natu- 
ral, and the greater glory is therefore lost, but the power 
is not less nor the beauty. 

88. The Decline of the Drama begins while Shake- 
speare is alive. At first we can scarcely call it decline, 
it was so superb in its own qualities. For it began 
with "rare Ben Jonson." With him are connected 
by associated work, by quarrels, and by date, Dekker, 
Marston, and Chapman. They belong with Shakespeare 
to the days of Elizabeth and the days of James I. Ben 
Jonson's first play, in its very title, Every Mafi i?i his 
Humour, 1596, enables us to say in what the first step 
of this decline consisted. The drama in Shakespeare's 
hands had been the painting of the whole of human 
nature, the painting of characters as they were built up 
by their natural bent, and by the play of circumstance 
upon them. The drama, in Ben Jonson's hands, was 
the painting of particular phases of human nature, espe- 
cially of his own age ; and his characters are men and 
women as they may become when they are completely 
mastered by a special bias of the mind or Humour. 
"The Manners, now called Humours, feed the stage," 
says Jonson himself. Every Man in his Humour was 
followed by Every Man out of his Humour, and by 
Cynthia's Revels, written to satirise the courtiers The 



142 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 

fierce satire of these plays brought the town down upon 
him, and he rephed to their " noise " in the Poetaster^ 
in which Dekker and Marston were satirised. Dekker 
answered with the Satiro-Mastix, a bitter parody on 
the Poetaster, in which he did not spare Jonson's bodily 
defects. Silent then for two years, he reappeared with 
the tragedy of Seja?tus, and then quickly produced 
three splendid comedies in James I.'s reign, Volpone the 
Fox, the Silent Woman, and the AlcheiJiist, 1605-9-10. 
The fi.st is the finest thing he ever did, as great in 
power as it is in the interest and skill of its plot ; the 
second is chiefly valuable as a picture of English life 
in high society; the third is full of Jonson's obscure 
learning, but its character of Sir Epicure Mammon is 
done with Jonson's keenest power. In 161 1 his Catiline 
appeared, and then Ba7'tholomew Fair, Eight years 
after he was made Poet Laureate. Soon he became 
poor and palsy-stricken, but his genius did not decay. 
His tender and imaginative pastoral drama, the Sad 
Shepherd, proves that, like Shakespeare, Jonson grew 
gentler as he grew near to death, and death took him 
in 1637. He was a great man. The power and copi- 
ousness of the young Elizabethan age belonged to him ; 
and he stands far below, for he had no passion, but 
still worthily by, Shakespeare, " a robust, surly, and ob- 
serving dramatist." Thos. Dekker, whose lovely lyrics 
are well known, and whose copious prose occupies five 
volumes, " had poetry enough," Lamb said, " for any- 
thing." His light comedies of ra^iiners are excellent 



TV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I43 

pictures of the time. But his romantic poetry is better 
felt in such dramas as Patient G?'issilj Old Fortimatus, 
and The Witch of Edmo7iton^ in which, though others 
worked them along with Dekker, the women are all his 
own by tenderness, grace, subtlety, and pathos. John 
Marston, whose chief plays were written between 1602 
and 1605, needs little notice here. He is best known 
by certain noble and beautiful passages, and his finest 
plays were Antonio and Mellida and the Malcontent. 
Of the three Geo. Chapman was the most various genius, 
and the most powerful. He illuminated the age of 
Elizabeth by the first part of his translation of Homer ; 
he lived on into the reign of Charles I. His poems 
(of which the best are his continuation of Marlowe's 
Hero and Leander, and The Tears of Peace) are ex- 
treme examples of the gnarled, sensuous, formless, and 
obscure poetry of which Dryden cured our literature. 
His plays are of a finer quality, especially the five 
tragedies taken from French history. They are weighty 
with thought, but the thought devours their action, and 
they are difficult and sensational. Inequahty pervades 
them. His mingling of intellectual violence with intel- 
lectual imagination, of obscurity with a noble exultation 
and clearness of poetry, is a strange compound of the 
earher and later Ehzabethans. He, like Marlowe, but 
with less of beauty, "hurled instructive fire about the 
world." With these three I may mention Cyril Tourneur 
and John Day, the one as ferocious in the Atheisfs Trag- 
edy cis the other was graceful in his Parlia7Jie?it of Bees, 



144 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Both were poets, and both were more truly Elizabethan 
than Beaumont, Fletcher, or Webster. 

89. Masques. — Rugged as Jonson was, he could turn 
to light and graceful work, and it is with his name that 
we connect the Masques. He wrote them delightfully. 
Masques were dramatic representations made for a fes- 
tive occasion, with a reference to the persons present 
and the occasion. Their personages were allegorical. 
They admitted of dialogue, music, singing, and dancing, 
combined by the use of some ingenious fable into a 
whole. They were made and performed for the court 
and the houses of the nobles, and the scenery was as 
gorgeous and varied as the scenery of the playhouse 
proper was poor and unchanging. Arriving for the first 
time at any repute in Henry VIH.'s time, they reached 
splendour under James and Charles I. Great men took 
part in them. When Ben Jonson wrote them, Inigo 
Jones made the scenery and Lawes the music ; and 
Lord Bacon, Wliitelock, and Selden sat in committee 
for the last great masque presented to Charles. Milton 
himself made them worthier by writing Co/nus, and their 
scenic decoration was soon introduced into the regular 
theatres. 

90. Beaumont and Fletcher worked together, and be- 
long not only in date, but in spirit, to the reign of James. 
In two plays, Henry /III. and The Two Noble Ki7isr?ie?i, 
Fletcher has been linked to Shakespeare. With Beau- 
mont as fellow-worker and counsellor, he wrote about 
a third of the more than fifty plays which go undei 



ir THE ENGLISH DRAMA 145 

their names. Beaumont died, aged thirty, in 1616, 
Fletcher, aged fifty, in 1625. The creative power of 
the Ehzabethan time has no more striking example 
than in their vast production. The inventiveness of 
the plays is astonishing, and their plots are almost 
always easily connected and well supported. Far the 
greater part of the work was done by Fletcher, but it 
has been tried to trace Beaumont's hand chiefly in such 
fine tragedies as The Maid's Tragedy and Philaster. 
In comedy Fletcher is gay, and quick, and interesting. 
In tragedy and comedy alike, his level of goodness is 
equal, but then we have none of those magnificent out- 
bursts of imaginative passion to which, up to this time, 
we have been accustomed. The Faithful Shepherdess 
of Fletcher is a lovely pastoral, and the lyrics which 
diversify his plays have even some of the charm of 
Shakespeare. 

He and his fellows represent a distinct change, and 
not Jor the better, in the drama — a kind of fourth 
stage. Its poetry is on the whole less masculine. Its 
blank verse is rendered smoother and sweeter by the 
incessant addition of an eleventh syllable, but it is also 
enfeebled. This weak ending, by the additional free- 
dom and elasticity it gave to the verse, was suited to 
the rapid dialogue of comedy, but the dignity of trag- 
edy was lowered by it. The change is also seen in 
other matters. In the previous plays moral justice is 
done. The good are divided from the bad. Fletcher 
seems quite indifferent to this. In the previous plays, 



146 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

men and women, save in Shakespeare, are coarse and 
foul enough at times, but they are so by nature or 
under furious passion. In Fletcher, there is a natural 
indecency, an every-day foulness of thought, which be- 
longs to the good and the bad alike. The women are, 
when good, beyond nature, and, when bad, below it. 
The situations invented tend to be studiously out of the 
way, beyond the natural aspects of humanity. The aim 
of art has changed for the worse. It strives for the 
strange and the sensational. Even John Webster lost 
some of the power his genius gave him by the ghastly 
situations he chose to dwell upon. Yet he all but re- 
deemed the worst of them by the intensity of his imag- 
ination, and by the soul-piercing power with which, in 
a few words, he sounds the depths of the human heart 
when it is wrought b^'' "emorse, by sorrow, by fear, or 
by wrath to its greatest point of passion. Moreover, 
in his worst characters there is some redeeming touch, 
and this poetic pity saves his sensationalism from weari- 
ness, and brings him nearer to Shakespeare than others 
of his time. His two greatest plays, things which will 
be glorious forever in poetry, are The Duchess of 
Malfi, acted in 161 6, and the White Devil^ Vittoria 
Corrombona^ printed in 161 2. One other play of the 
time is held to approach them in poetic quality. The 
Changelings by Thomas Middleton, but it does so only 
in parts. 

91. Decay of the Drama. — In the next dramatists, in 
the followers, if I may thus class them, of Massinger 



rv THE ENGLISH DRAMA 147 

and Ford, the change for the worse in the drama is 
more marked than in the work of those of whom we 
have been speaking. The poetic and creative qualities 
are both less, the sensationalism is greater, the foulness 
of language increases, the situations are more out of 
nature, the verse is clumsier and more careless, the 
composition and connexion of the plots are tumbled 
and confused. But these statements are only moder- 
ately true of Massinger and Ford. They stand at the 
head of the rapid decay of the drama, but they still 
retain a predominant part of that which made the 
Elizabethans great. Massinger's first dated play was 
the Virgin Martyr, 1620. He lived poor, and died 
"a stranger," in 1639. In these twenty years he wrote 
thirty-seven plays, of which the New Way to Pay Old 
Debts is the best known by its character of Sir Giles 
Overreach. His versification and language are flexible 
and strong, "and seem to rise out of the passions he 
describes." He speaks the tongue of real life. He is 
greater than he seems to be. Like Fletcher, there is 
a steady equality in his work. Coarse, even foul as he 
is in speech, he is the most moral of the secondary 
dramatists. Nowhere is his work so forcible as when 
he represents the brave man struggling through trial to 
victory, the pure woman suffering for the sake of truth 
and love; or when he describes the terrors that con- 
science brings on injustice and cruelty. John Ford, 
his contemporary, published his first play, the Lover's 
Melancholy y in 1629, and five years after, Perkin War- 



14^ ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

beck, one of the best historical dramas after Shake- 
speare. Between these dates appeared others, of which 
the best are the Broken Heart and 'Tis Pity She's a 
Whore. He carried to an extreme the tendency of the 
drama to unnatural and horrible subjects, but he did so 
with great power. He has no comic humour, but few 
men have described better the worn and tortured hu- 
man heart. A crowd of dramatists carried on the pro- 
duction of plays till the Commonwealth. Some names 
alone we can mention here — Thomas Heywood, Henry 
Glapthorne, Richard Broome, William Rowley, Thomas 
Randolph, Nabbes, and Davenport. Of these "all of 
whom," says Lamb, " spoke nearly the same language, 
and had a set of moral feelings and notions in com- 
mon,'" James Shirley is the best and last. He lived 
till 1666. In him the fire and passion of the old time 
pass away, but some of the delicate poetry remains, and 
in him the Elizabethan drama dies. Sir John Suckling 
and Davenant, who wrote plays before the Common- 
wealth, can scarcely be called even decadent Eliza- 
bethans. In 1642 the theatres were closed during the 
calamitous times of the Civil War. Strolling players 
managed to exist with difficulty, and against the law, 
till 1656, when Sir WilHam Davenant had his opera 
of the Siege of Rhodes acted in London. It was the 
beginning of a new drama, in every point but impurity 
dififerent from the old, and four years after, at the Res- 
toration, it broke loose from the prison of Puritanism to 
indulge in a shameless license. 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I49 

In this rapid sketch of the drama in England we 
have been carried on beyond the death of Ehzabeth 
to the date of the Restoration. It was necessary, be- 
cause it keeps the whole story together. We now re- 
turn to the time that followed the accession of James I. 



150 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER V 

FROM ELIZABETH'S DEATH TO THE RESTORATION, 
1603-1660 

92. The Literature of this Period may fairly be 
called Elizabethan, but not so altogether. The prose 
retained the manner of the Elizabethan time and the 
faults of its style, but gradually grew into greater ex- 
cellence, spread itself over larger fields of thought, and 
took up a greater variety of subjects. The poetry, on 
the whole, decHned. It exaggerated the vices of the 
Elizabethan art, and lessened its virtues. But this is 
not the whole account of the matter. We must add 
that a new prose, of greater force of thought and of a 
simpler style than the Elizabethan, arose in the writings 
of a theologian like Chillingworth, an historian like 
Clarendon, and a philosopher Hke Hobbes : and that 
a new type of poetry, distinct from the poetry of fan- 
tastic wit into which Elizabethan poetry had descended, 
was written by some of the lyrical writers. It was Eliza- 
bethan in its lyric note, but it was not obscure. It had 
grace, simplicity, and smoothness. In its greater art and 
?)'earness it tells us that the critical school is at hand. 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION I5I 

93. Prose Literature. James I. — The greatest prose 
triumph of this time was the Authorised Version of the 
Bible. There is no need to dwell on it, nor on all it has 
done for the literature of England. It lives in almost 
every book of worth and imagination, and its style, es- 
pecially when the subject soars, is inspired by the spirits 
of fitness and beauty and melody. Philosophy passed 
from Elizabeth into the reign of James I. with Francis 
Bacon. The splendour of the form and of the English 
prose of the Advance??tent of Learning, two books of 
which were published in 1605, raises it into the realm 
of pure literature. -It was expanded into nine Latin 
books in 1623, and with the Novum Organon, finished 
in 1620, and the Historia Naturalis et Experi7nentalis, 
1622, formed the Listauratio Magna. The impulse 
these books gave to research, and to the true method 
of research, awoke scientific inquiry in England ; and 
before the Royal Society was constituted in the reign of 
Charles II., our science, though far behind that of the 
Continent, had done some good work. William Harvey 
lectured on the circulation of the blood in 16 15, and 
during the Civil War and the Commonwealth men like 
Robert Boyle, the chemist, John Wallis, the mathe- 
matician, and others, met in WilHam Betty's rooms at 
Brazenose, and prepared the way for Newton. 

94. History, except in the publication of the earlier 
Chronicles of Archbishop Parker, does not appear in 
the later part of Elizabeth's reign, but under James I. 
Camden, Spelman, Selden, and Speed continued the anti- 



152 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

quarian researches of Stow and Grafton. Bacon wrote 
a dignified History of Henry VII., and Daniel the poet, 
in his Histoij of England to the Time of Edward III, 
1 6 13-18, was one of the first to throw history into such a 
hterary form as to make it popular. Knolles's History 
of the Turks, 1603, and Sir Walter Raleigh's vast 
sketch of the History of the World, show how for the 
first time history spread itself beyond English interests. 
Raleigh's book, written in the peaceful evening of a 
stormy life, and in the quiet of his prison, is not only 
literary from the impulsive passages which adorn it, but 
from its still spirit of melancholy thought. In 16 14, 
John Selden's Titles of Honour added to the accurate 
work he had done in Latin on the English Records, 
and his Histo?y of Tithes was written with the same 
careful regard for truth in 1618. 

9 5 . Miscellaneous Literature. — The pleasure of Travel, 
still lingering among us from Elizabeth's reign, found a 
quaint voice in Thomas Coryat's Crudities, which, in 
16 1 1, describes his journey through France and Italy; 
and in George Sandys' book, 161 5, which tells his 
journey in the East ; while Henry Wotton's Letters from 
Italy are pleasant reading. The care with which Samuel 
Purchas embodied (1613) in Pu?'chas his Pilgri77iage 
(" his own in matter, though borrowed ") and in Hak- 
luyfs Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), the 
great deeds, sea voyages, and land travels of adventurers, 
brings us back to the time when England went out to 
win the world. The painting of short " Characters " 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 153 

was begun by Sir Thomas Overbury's book in 1614, and 
carried on in the following reign by John Earle and 
Joseph Hall, who became bishops. This kind of litera- 
ture marks the interest in individual life which now began 
to arise, and which soon took form in Biography. 

96. In the Caroline Period and the Commonwealth, 
Prose grew into a nearer approach to the finished in- 
strument it became after the R^estoration. History was 
illuminated, and its style dignified, by the work of Claren- 
don — the History of the Rebellion (begun in 1641) and 
his own Life. Thomas May wrote the History of the 
Farliafnent of 1640, a book with a purpose. Thomas 
Fuller's Church History of Britaifi, 1656, may in style 
and temper be put alongside of his Worthies of Eftgland 
in 1662. 

In Theology and Philosophy the masters of prose at 
this time were Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Hobbes. It 
is a comfort amidst the noisy war of party to breathe the 
calm spiritual air of The Great Exemplar and the Holy 
Living and Dying which Taylor published at the close 
of the reign of Charles I. They had been preceded in 
1647 by the Libej'ty of Pi^ophesying, in which, agreeing 
with his contemporaries, John Hales and Wilham Chil- 
lingworth, he pleaded the cause of religious toleration, 
and of rightness of life as more important than correct 
theology. Taylor was the most eloquent of men, and 
the most facile of orators. Laden with thought, his 
books are read for their sweet and deep devotion (a 
quality which also belonged to his fellow-writer, Lancelot 



154 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Andrewes), even more than for their impassioned and 
convoluted outbreaks of beautiful words. On the Puritan 
side, the fine sermons of Richard Sibbes converted Rich- 
ard Baxter, whose manifold literary work only ended in 
the reign of James 11. One little thing of his, written 
at the close of the Civil War, became a household book 
in England. There used to be few cottages which did 
not possess a copy of the Saints' Everlasting Rest. The 
best work of Hobbes belonged to Charles I. and the 
Commonwealth, but will better be noticed hereafter. 
The other great prose writer is one of a number of 
men whose productions may be classed under the title 
of Miscellaneous Literature. He is Sir Thomas Browne, 
who, born in 1605, died in 1682. In 1642 his Religio 
Medici was printed, and the book ran over Europe. 
The Enquiry into Vulgar Errors followed in 1646, and 
the Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial, in 1658. These books, 
with other happy things of his, have by their quaintness, 
their fancy, and their special charm always pleased the 
world, and often kindled weary prose into fresh produc- 
tion. We may class with them Robert Burton's Anatomy 
of Melancholy, a book of inventive wit and scattered learn- 
ing, and Thomas Fuller's Holy and Profane State and 
Worthies of England, in which gaiety and piety, good 
sense and whimsical fancy meet. This kind of writing 
was greatly increased by the setting up of libraries, 
where men dipped into every kind of literature. It 
was in James I.'s reign that Sir Thomas Bodley estab- 
hshed the Bodleian at Oxford, and Sir Robert Cotton 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 55 

a library now in the British Museum. A number of 
writers took part in the Puritan and Church contro- 
versies, among whom for graphic force William Prynne 
stands out clearly. But the great controversialist was 
Milton. His prose is still, under the Commonwealth, 
Elizabethan in style. It has the fire and violence, the 
eloquence and diffuseness of the earlier literature, but in 
spite of the praise its style has received, it can in reahty 
be scarcely called a style. It has all the faults a prose 
style can have except obscurity and the commonplace. 
Its magnificent storms of eloquence ought to be in 
poetry, and it never charms, though it amazes, except 
when Milton becomes purposely simple in personal 
narrative. It has no humour, but it has almost unex- 
ampled individuahty and ferocity. Among this tem- 
pestuous pamphleteering one pamphlet is almost singular 
in its masterly and uplifted thought, and the style only 
rarely loses its dignity. This is the Areopagitica. In 
pleasant contrast to these controversies arises the gentle 
literature of Izaak Walton's Compleat A?igkr, 1653, a 
book which resembles in its quaint and garrulous style 
the rustic scenery and prattling rivers that it celebrates, 
and marks the quiet interest in country Hfe which had 
now arisen in England. Prose, then, in the time of 
James and Charles I., and of the Commonwealth, had 
largely developed its powers. 

97. The Poetry of the Reign of James I. — It is said 
that during this reign and the following one, poetry 
declined. On the whole that is true, but it is true with 



156 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

many modifications. We must remember that Shake- 
speare and many of the EHzabethan poets, Hke Drayton 
and Daniel, did their finest work in the reign of James I. 
Yet there was dechne. The various elements which we 
have noticed in the poetry of Elizabeth's reign, without 
the exception even of the slight Catholic element, though 
opposed to each other, were filled with one spirit — ^ the 
love of England and the queen. Nor were they ever 
sharply divided ; they are found interwoven, and modi- 
fying one another in the same poet, as for instance Puri- 
tanism and Chivalry in Spenser, Catholicism and Love in 
Constable : and all are mixed together in Shakespeare 
and the dramatists. This unity of spirit in poetry 
became less and less after the queen's death. The ele- 
ments remained, but they were separated. The cause of 
this was that the strife in politics between the Divine 
Right of Kings and Liberty, and in rehgion between the 
Church and the Puritans, grew so defined and intense 
that England ceased to be at one, and the poets repre- 
sented the parties, not the whole, of England. Then, 
too, that general passion and life which inflamed every- 
thing EHzabethan lessened, and as it lessened, the faults 
of the Elizabethan work became more prominent ; they 
were even supposed to be excellences. Hence the fan- 
tastic, far-fetched, involved style, which was derived from 
the Euphues and the Arcadia, grew into favour and was 
developed in verse, till it ended by greatly injuring good 
sense and clearness in English poetry. In the reaction 
from this the critical and classical school began. Again, 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 5/ 

when passion lessens, original work lessens, and imitation 
begins. The reign of James is marked by a class of 
poets who imitated Spenser. Giles Fletcher in his 
Chrisfs Victory and Triumph, 1610, owned Spenser as 
his master. So did his brother Phineas Fletcher, whose 
Purple Island, an allegory of the human body, 1633, has 
both grace and sweetness. We may not say that Will- 
iam Browne imitated, but only that he was influenced 
by Spenser. His Brifannia^s Pastorals in two parts, 
1613-16, followed by the seven eclogues of the ^/^^//^dr^/'i" 
Pipe, are an example in true poetry of the ever-recurring 
element in English poetry, pleasure in country life and 
scenery, which from this time forth grew through Milton, 
Wither, Marvell, and then, after an apparent death, through 
Thomson, Gray, and Collins, into its wonderful flower in 
our own century. These, if we include the poetry of the 
Dramatists, especially the Underivoods of Ben Jonson, 
and the poems already mentioned of Drummond and 
Stirhng, are the poets of the reign of James I. They 
link back to Elizabeth's time and its temper, and it may 
be said of them that they have no special turn, save that 
which arises from their own individuality. That cannot 
be said of the poets of Charles I.'s reign, even though 
they may be classed as writing under the influence of 
Ben Jonson and of Donne. 

98. The Caroline Poets, as they are called, are love 
poets or religious poets. Often, as in the case of Herrick 
and Crashaw, they combined both kinds into a single 
volume. Sometimes they were only rehgious like Her 



158 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

bert, sometimes only love poets like Lovelace and Suck- 
ling. But whatever they were, they were as individual as 
Botticelli, with whose position and whose contemporaries 
in painting they may, with much justice, be compared. 
The greatest of these was Robert Herrick. The gay 
and glancing charm of The Hes^peiides, 1648, in which 
Horace and Tibullus seem to mingle ; their peculiar art 
which never misses its aim, nor fails in exquisite execution ; 
the almost equal power of The Noble Numbers, published 
along with the Hesperides, in which the spiritual side of 
Herrick's nature expressed itself, make him, within his 
self-chosen and limited range, the most remarkable of 
those who at this time sat below the mountain top on 
which Milton was alone. Close beside him, but more 
unequal, was Thomas Carew, whose lyrical poems, well 
known as they are, do not prevent our pleasure in his 
graver work like the Elegy on Donne. Greater in im- 
agination, but more unequal still, was Richard Crashaw. 
One of his poems. The Flaming Heart, expresses in its 
name his religious nature and his art. He does not 
burn with a steady fire, he flames to heaven ; and when 
he does, he is divine in music and in passion. At other 
times he is one of the worst of the fantasticals, of those 
lovers of the quaint for quaintness' sake, among whom the 
exclusively religious poets of the time are sadly to be 
classed. There is George Herbert, whose Temple, 
1 63 1, is, by the purity and devotion of its poems, dear 
to all. It is his quiet religion, his quaint, contemplative, 
vicarage-garden note of thought and scholarship which 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 59 

pleases most, and will always please, the calm piety of 
England. He also is individual, and so is Henry 
Vaughan, whose Sacred Poems, 165 1, unequal as a whole, 
love nature dearly, and leap sometimes into a higher air 
of poetry than Herbert could attain ; " transcend our 
wonted themes, and into glory peep." Nor must we 
forget William Habington, who mingled his devotion to 
Roman CathoUcism with the praises of his wife under the 
name of Caslara, 1634; nor George Wither, who sent 
forth, just before the Civil War began, when he left the 
king for the Parliament, his Hallelujah, 1641, a noble 
series of religious poems ; nor Francis Quarles, whose 
Divine Emblems, 1635, is still read in the cottages of 
England. These poets, with Henry More, the Platonist, 
and Joseph Beaumont, the friend of Crashaw and the 
rival of More, are far below (Wither's work being ex- 
cepted) both Herbert and Vaughan, and bring to an end 
the religious poetry of this curious transition time. I 
have omitted some poems of Cowley and of Edmund 
Waller, which appeared during the Commonwealth, be- 
cause both these poets belong to a new class of poetry, 
the classical poetry of the Restoration. Between this 
new kind of poetry, which rose to full power in Dryden, 
and the dying poetry of the transition, stands alone the 
majestic work of a great genius who touches the great 
EHzabethan time with one hand and our own time with 
the other. But beiore we speak of Milton, a word must 
be said of the lyrics. 

99. The Songs and other Lyrical Poetry. — All through 



t60 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

the period between James I. and the Restoration, Song- 
writing went on, and was more natural and less " meta- 
physical " than the other forms of poetry. The elements 
of decay attacked it slowly ; those of brightness and pas- 
sion, nature and gaiety, continued to live in it. Moreover, 
the time was remarkable for no small number of lyrical 
poems, other than songs, of a strange loveliness, in which 
the Elizabethan excellences were enhanced by a special, 
particular grace, due partly to the more isolated life some 
of the poets led, and partly to the growth among them of 
a more artistic method. 

With regard to the Songs, a distinct set of them, on the 
most various subjects, are to be found in the Dramatists, 
from Ben Jonson to Shirley. Another set has been 
collected out of the many Song-books which appeared 
with music and words. Many arose in the court of 
Charles I. and among the Royahsts in the country, — 
Cavalier songs — on love, on constancy, on dress, on 
fleeting fancies of every kind. Others were on battle and 
death for the king ; and a few, sterner and more ideal, 
on the Puritan side. The same power of song- writing 
went on for a brief time after the Restoration, but finally 
perished in the political ballad which was sung about the 
streets by the political parties of the Revolution. Then 
the song-lyric of love was almost silent till the days of 
Burns. 

With regard to the Lyrical poems, it is impossible to 
mention all that are worthy, but an age which produced 
the masques, the poems, and the Sad Shepherd of Ben 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION l6l 

Jonson ; which heard the lyrical measures of Fletcher's 
Faithful Shepherdess ; which read with joy Herrick's 
Corinna and his country lyrics ; which wished, while it 
had its delight in Wither's Philarete, that it was not so 
long ; which felt a finer thrill than usual of the imagina- 
tion in Marvell's Eniig7'ants in ike Bermudas and The 
Thoughts ifi a Garden ; which was caught, as it were into 
another world, by the Allegro, the Penseroso, the songs 
in Comus and the Abrades, and by the Lycidas of Milton 
— can scarcely be called an age of decay. There was 
dechne, on the whole. We feel what had passed away 
when we come to the days of the Restoration. But the 
Ehzabethan lyrical day died in a lovely sunset. And as 
if to make this clear, we meet with Milton who bore the 
passion, the force, and the beauty of the past along with 
his own grandeur into the age of Dryden. 

100. John Milton was the last of the Ehzabethans, and, 
except Shakespeare, far the greatest of them all. Born in 
1608, in Bread Street (close by the Mermaid Tavern), he 
may have seen Shakespeare, for he remained till he was 
sixteen in London. His literary hfe may be said to begin 
with his entrance into Cambridge, in 1625, the year of the 
accession of Charles I. Nicknamed the " Lady of Christ's " 
from his beauty, dehcate taste, and moral life, he soon 
attained a reputation by his Latin poems and discourses, 
and by his EngHsh poems which revealed as clear and 
original a genius as that of Chaucer and Spenser. Of 
Milton even more than of the two others, it may be said 
that he was " whole in himself, and owed to none." The 

M 



1 62 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

Ode to the Nativity, 1629, the third poem he composed, 
while it went back to the EHzabethan age in beauty, in 
instinctive fire, went forward into a new world of art, the 
world where the architecture of the lyric is finished with 
majesty and music. The next year heard the noble 
sounding strains of At a Solemn Music ; and the sonnet, 
On Attaining the Age of Twenty-thi^ee , reveals in dignified 
beauty that intense personality which lives, like a force, 
through every line he wrote. He left the university in 
1632, and went to live at Horton, near Windsor, where 
he spent five years, steadily reading the Greek and Latin 
writers, and amusing himself with mathematics and music. 
Poetry was not neglected. The Allegro and Penseroso 
were written in 1633 and probably the Arcades ; Comus 
was acted in 1634, and Lycidas composed in 1637. 
They prove that though Milton was Puritan in heart his 
Puritanism was of that earlier type which disdained 
neither the arts nor letters. But they represent a grow- 
ing revolt from the Court and the Church. The Pen- 
seroso prefers the contemplative life to the mirthful, and 
Comus, though a masque, rose into a celestial poem to 
the glory of temperance, and under its allegory attacked 
the Court. Three years later, Lycidas interrupts its ex- 
quisite stream of poetry with a fierce and resolute onset 
on the greedy shepherds of the Church. Milton had 
taken his Presbyterian bent. 

In 1638 he went to Italy, the second home of so many 
of the English poets, visited Florence where he saw 
Galileo, and then passed on to Rome. At Naples he 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 63 

heard the sad news of civil war, which determined him 
to return ; " inasmuch as I thought it base to be travel- 
hng at my ease for amusement, while my fellow-country- 
men at home were fighting for liberty." At the meeting 
of the Long Parliament we find him in a house in Alders- 
gate, where he lived till 1645. He had projected while 
abroad a great epic poem on the subject of Arthur, but 
in London his mind changed, and among a number of 
subjects, tended at last to Paradise Lost, which he meant 
to throw, into the form of a Greek Tragedy with lyrics 
and choruses. 

loi. Milton's Prose. The Commonwealth. — Suddenly 
his whole hfe changed, and for twenty years — 1 640-60 
— he was carried out of art into poHtics, out of poetry 
into prose. Most of the Sonnets, however, belong to 
this time. Stately, rugged, or graceful, as he pleased to 
make them, some with the solemn grandeur of Hebrew 
psalms, others having the classic ease of Horace, some 
of his own grave tenderness, they are true, unlike those 
of Shakespeare and Spenser, to the correct form of this 
difficult kind of poetry. But they were all he could now 
do of his true work. Before the Civil War began in 
1642, he had written five vigorous pamphlets against 
Episcopacy. Six more pamphlets appeared in the next 
two years. One of these was the Areopagitica ; or, 
Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 1644, a 
bold and eloquent attack on the censorship of the press 
by the Presbyterians. Another, remarkable, hke the 
Areopagitica, for its finer prose, was a tract On Educa- 



164 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAI 

iio7i. The four pamphlets in which he advocated con- 
ditional divorce made him still more the horror of the 
Presbyterians, In 1646 he pubhshed his poems, and in 
that year the sonnet On the Forcers of Conscience shows 
that he had wholly ceased to be Presbyterian. His 
political pamphlets begin when his Tenure of Ki?igs and 
Magistrates defended in 1649 the execution of the king. 
The Eikonoclastes answered the Eikon Basilike (a portrait- 
ure of the suiferings of the king) ; and his famous Latin 
Defence for the People of England, 1651, replied to Sal- 
masius's Defence of Charles /., and inflicted so pitiless a 
lashing on the great Leyden scholar that Milton's fame 
went over the whole of Europe. In the next year he 
wholly lost his sight. But he continued his work (being 
Latin secretary since 1649) when Cromwell was made 
Protector, and wrote another Defence for the English 
People, 1654, and a further Defence of Himself 2Lg2XYi%\. 
scurrilous charges. This closed the controversy in 1655. 
In the last year of the Protector's life he began the 
Paradise Lost, but the death of Cromwell threw him 
back into politics, and three more pamphlets on the 
questions of a Free Church and a Free Commonwealth 
were useless to prevent the Restoration. It was a won- 
der he was not put to death in 1660, and he was in hid- 
ing and also in custody for a time. At last he settled in 
a house near Bunhill Fields. It was here that Paradise 
Lost\ysiS finished, before the end of 1665, and then pub- 
lished in 1667. 

102. Paradise Lost. — We may regret that Milton was 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 165 

shut away from his art during twenty years of contro- 
versy. But it may be that the poems he wrote when the 
great cause he fought for had closed in seeming defeat 
but real victory, gained from its solemn issues and from 
the moral grandeur with which he wrought for its ends 
their majestic movement, their grand style, and their 
grave beauty. During the struggle he had never for- 
gotten his art. ''I may one day hope," he said, speak- 
ing of his youthful studies, " to have ye again, in a still 
time, when there shall be no chiding. Not in these 
Noises," and the saying strikes the note of calm sublim- 
ity which is kept in Paradise Lost. 

As we read the great epic, we feel that the lightness of 
heart of the Allegro, that even the quiet classic philosophy 
of the C0771US, are gone. The beauty of the poem is like 
that of a stately temple, which, vast in conception, is 
involved in detail. The style is the greatest in the whole 
range of English poetry. Milton's intellectual force sup- 
ports and condenses his imaginative force, and his art is 
almost too conscious of itself Sublimity is its essential 
difference. The subject is one phase of the great and 
universal subject of high poetic thought and passion, that 
3truggle of Light with Darkness, of Evil with Good, 
which, arising in a hundred myths, keeps its undying 
attraction to the present day. But its great difficulty in 
his case was that he was obliged to interest us, for a 
great part of the poem, in two persons, who, being inno- 
cent, were without any such play of human passion and 
trouble as we find in QEdipus, ^neas, Hamlet, or Alceste, 



1 66 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

In the noble art with which this is done Milton is su- 
preme. The interest of the story collects at first round 
the character of Satan, but he grows meaner as the poem 
develops, and his second degradation after he has de- 
stroyed innocence is one of the finest and most consistent 
motives in the poem. This at once disposes of the view 
that Milton meant Satan to be the hero of the epic. His 
hero is Man. The deep tenderness of Milton, his love 
of beauty, the passionate fitness of his words to his work, 
his religious depth, fill the scenes in which he paints 
Paradise, our parents and their fall, and at last all thought 
and emotion centre round Adam and Eve, until the 
closing lines leave us with their lonely image on our 
minds. In every part of the poem, in every character in 
it, as indeed in all his poems, Milton's intense individu- 
ality appears. It is a pleasure to find it. The egotism, 
of such a man, said Coleridge, is a revelation of spirit. 

103. Milton's Later Poems. — Paradise Lost w2iS fol- 
lowed by Faf'adise Regaijted and Samson Agontstes, pub- 
lished together in 1 67 1. Paradise Regained o'pQns with 
the journey of Christ into the wilderness after his bap- 
tism, and its four books describe the temptation of Christ 
by Satan, and the answers and victory of the Redeemer. 
The speeches in it overwhelm the action, and their 
learned argument is only relieved by a few descriptions ; 
but these, as in that of Athens, are done with Milton's 
highest power. Its solemn beauty of quietude, and a 
more severe style than that of Paradise Lost, make us 
feel in it that Milton has grown older. 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 167 

In Samson Agonistes the style is still severer, even to 
the verge of a harshness which the sublimity alone tends 
to modify. It is a choral drama, after the Greek model. 
Samson in his blindness is described, is called on to make 
sport for the Philistines, and overthrows them in the end. 
Samson represents the fallen Puritan cause, and Samson's 
victorious death Milton's hopes for the final triumph of 
that cause. The poem has all the grandeur of the last 
words of a great man in whom there was now " calm of 
mind, all passion spent." It is also the last word of the 
music of the Elizabethan drama long after its notes 
seemed hushed, and its deep sound is strange in the 
midst of the shallow noise of the Restoration. Soon 
afterwards, November, 1674, blind and old and fallen on 
evil days, Milton died ; but neither blindness, old age, 
nor evil days could lessen the inward light, nor impair 
the imaginative power with which he sang, it seemed 
with the angels, the "undisturbed song of pure concent," 
until he joined himself, at last, with those "just spirits 
who wear victorious palms." 

104. His Work. — ^To the greatness of the artist Milton 
joined the majesty of a clear and lofty character. His 
poetic style was as stately as his character, and proceeded 
from it. Living at a time when criticism began to purify 
the verse of England, and being himself well acquainted 
with the great classical models, his work is seldom weak- 
ened by the false conceits and the intemperance of the 
Elizabethan writers, and yet is as imaginative as theirs, 
and as various. He has not their naturalness, nor all 



1 68 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAl'. 

their intensity, but he has a larger grace, a loveUer col- 
our, a closer eye for nature, a more finished art, and a 
sublime dignity they did not possess. All the kinds of 
poetry which he touched he touched with the ease of 
great strength, and with so much energy, that they be- 
came new in his hands. He put a fresh life into the 
masque, the sonnet, the elegy, the descriptive lyric, the 
song, the choral drama ; and he created the epic in 
England. The hghter love poem he never wrote, and 
we are grateful that he kept his coarse satirical power 
apart from his poetry. In some points he was untrue 
to his descent from the Elizabethans, for he had no dra- 
matic faculty, and he had no humour. He summed up 
in himself the learned and artistic influences of the Eng- 
lish Renaissance, and handed them on to us. His taste 
was as severe, his verse as polished, his method and lan- 
guage as strict as those of the school of Dryden and 
Pope that grew up when ' he was old. A literary past 
and present thus met in him, nor did he fail, like all the 
greatest men, to make a cast into the future. He estab- 
lished the poetry of pure natural description. Lastly, he 
did not represent in any way the England that followed 
the Stuarts, but he did represent Puritan England, and 
the whole spirit of Puritanism from its cradle to its grave. 
105. The Pilgrim's Progress. — We might say that 
Puritanism said its last great words with Milton, were it 
not that its spirit continued in English life, were it not 
also that four years after his death, in 1678, John Bun- 
van, who had previously written rehgious poems, and in 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 169 

1665 the Holy City, published the Pilgrim'' s Progress. 
It is the journey of Christian the Pilgrim from the City 
of Destruction to the Celestial City. The second part 
was published in 1684. In 1682 he had written the 
allegory of the Holy War, and in 16S0 The Life and 
Death of Mr. Badnian, a curious httle story. I class 
the Pilgrim's Progress here, because in its imaginative 
fer\'our and imagery, and in its quahty of naturalness, it 
belongs to the spirit of the Elizabethan times. Written 
by a man of the people, it is a people's book ; and its 
simple form grew out of passionate feeling, and not out 
of self-conscious art. The passionate feeling was relig- 
ious, and in painting the pilgrim's progress towards 
Heaven, and his battle with the world and temptation 
and sorrow, the book touched those deep and universal 
interests which belong to poor and rich. Its language, 
the language of the Bible, and its allegorical form, initi- 
ated a plentiful prose literature of a similar kind. But 
none have equalled it. Its form is almost epic : its dra- 
matic dialogue, its clear types of character, its vivid 
descriptions, as of Vanity Fair, and of places, such as the 
Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Delectable 
Mountains, which represent states of the human soul, 
have given an equal but a different pleasure to children 
and men, to the villager and the scholar. 



I/O ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER VI 

FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE AND 

SWIFT, 1 660-1 745 

106. Poetry. Change of Style. — We have seen the 
natural style as distinguished from the artificial in the 
Elizabethan poets. Style became not only natural but 
artistic when it was made by a great genius like Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, or Spenser, for a first-rate poet creates 
rules of art : his work is filled with laws which other men 
see, collect, and obey. Art, which is the just and lovely 
arrangement of nature to fulfil a nobly chosen aim, is 
then born. But when the art of poetry is making, the 
second-rate poets, inspired only by their feelings, will 
write in a natural style unrestrained by rules, that is, 
they will put their feelings into verse without caring 
much for the form in which they do it. As long as they 
live in the midst of a youthful national life, and feel an 
ardent sympathy with it, their style will be fresh and im- 
passioned, and give pleasure because of the strong feel- 
ing that inspires it. But it will also be extravagant and 
unrestrained in its use of images and words because of 
its want of art. This is the general history of the style 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE I /I 

of the second-class poets of the middle period of Eliza- 
beth's reign, and even Shakespeare affords examples of 
this want of art. (2) Afterwards the national life grew 
chill, and the feelings of the poets also chill. Then the 
want of art in the style made itself felt. The far-fetched 
images, the hazarded meanings, the over-fanciful way of 
putting thoughts, the sensational expression of feeling, 
in which the Elizabethan poets indulged, not only ap- 
peared in all their ugliness when they were inspired by 
no ardent feeling, but were indulged in far more than be- 
fore. Men tried to produce by extravagant use of words 
the same results that a passionate sense of life had pro- 
duced, and the more they failed the more extravagant and 
fantastic they became, till at last their poetry ceased to 
have clear meaning. This is the general history of the 
style of the poets from the later days of Elizabeth till the 
Civil War. (3) The natural style, unregulated by art, 
had thus become unnatural. When it had reached that 
point, men began to feel how necessary it was that the 
work of poetry should be subjected to the rules of art, 
and two influences partly caused and partly supported this 
desire. One was the influence of Milton. Milton, first 
by his superb genius, which, as I said, creates of itself 
rules of art, and secondly by his knowledge and imitation 
of the great classical models, was able to give the first 
example in England of a pure, grand, and finished style ; 
and in blank verse, in the lyric and the sonnet, wrote for 
the first time with absolute correctness. Another influence 
was that of the movement all over Europe towards inquiry 



1/2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAt 

into the right way of doing things, and into the truth oi 
things, a movement we shall soon see at work in science, 
politics, and rehgion. In poetry it produced a school 
of criticism which first took form in France, and the 
influence of Boileau, La Fontaine, and others who were 
striving after greater finish and neatness of expression, 
told on England now. It is an influence which has been 
exaggerated. It is absurd to place the " creaking lyre " 
of Boileau side by side with Dryden's " long resounding 
march and energy divine." Our critical school of poets 
have few French qualities in them even when they imi- 
tate the French. (4) Further, our own poets had 
already, before the Restoration, begun the critical work, 
and the French influence served only to give it a greater 
impulse. We shall see the growth of a colder and more 
correct phrasing and versification in Waller, Denham, and 
Cowley. Vigour was given to this new method in art by 
Dryden, and perfection of artifice added to it by Pope. 
The artificial style succeeded to and extinguished the 
natural, or to put it otherwise, a merely intellectual 
poetry finally overcame a poetry in which emotion always 
accompanied thought. 

107. Change of Poetic Subject. — The subject of the 
Elizabethan poets was Man as influenced by the Pas- 
sions, and it was treated from the side of natural feeling. 
This was fully and splendidly done by Shakespeare. But 
after a time this subject followed, as we have seen in 
speaking of the drama, the same career as the style. It 
was treated in an extravagant and sensational manner, 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 73 

and the representation of the passions tended to become 
unnatural or fantastic. Milton redeemed the subject 
from this vicious excess. He wrote in a grave and natu- 
ral Qianner of the passions of the human heart ; he made 
strong in English poetry the religious passions of love ot 
God, of sorrow for sin, and he raised in song the moral 
passions into a solemn splendour. But with him the 
subject of man as influenced by the great passions died 
for a time. Dryden, Pope, and their followers turned 
to another subject. They left, except in Dryden's 
Dramas and Fables, the passions aside, and wrote of the 
things in which the intellect and the casuistical con- 
science, the social and political instincts in man, were 
interested. In this way the satiric, didactic, philosophi- 
cal, and party poetry of a new school arose. 

108. The Poems in which the Few School began belong 
in date to the age before the Restoration, but in spirit 
and form they were the sources of the poetry which is 
called classical or critical, or artificial. Edmund Waller, 
Sir John Denham, and Abraham Cowley are the pre- 
cursors of Dryden. Waller remodelled the heroic coup- 
let of Chaucer, and gave it the precise character which 
made it for nearly a century and a half the prevaihng 
form of verse. He wrote his earliest poems about 1623, 
in precisely the same symmetrical manner as Dryden 
and Pope. His new manner was not followed for many 
years, till Denham published in 1642 his Cooper's Hill. 
" The excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully 
known," said Dryden, " till Mr. Waller taught it, but this 



174 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

sweetness of his lyric poetry was afterwards followed in 
the epic of Sir John Denham in his Cooper's Hill'' The 
chill stream of this poem, which is neither '' lyric " nor 
"epic," has the metrical cadence, but none of the grip 
and force of Dryden's verse. Cowley's earlier poems 
belong to the EHzabethan phantasies, but the later were, 
with the exception of some noble poems of personal feel- 
ing, cold and exact enough for the praise of the new 
school. He invented that curious misnomer — the Pin- 
daric Ode — which, among all its numerous offspring, 
had but one splendid child in Dryden's Alexander' s 
Feast. When Gray took up the ode again, Cowley was 
not his master. Sir W. Davenant's Gondibe?'t, 165 1, also 
an heroic poem, is another example of this transition. 
Worthless as poetry, it represents the new interest in 
political philosophy and in science that was arising, and 
preludes the intellectual poetry. Its preface discourses 
of rhyme and the rules of art, and embodies the critical 
influence which came over with the exiled court from 
France. The critical school had therefore begun even 
before Dryden's poems were written. The change was 
less sudden than it seemed. 

Satiric poetry, soon to become a greater thing, was 
made during this transition time into a powerful weapon 
by two men, each on a different side. Andrew Marvell's 
Satires, after the Restoration, exhibit the Puritan's wrath 
with the vices of the court and king, and his shame for 
the disgrace of England among the nations. The Hudi- 
bras of Samuel Butler, in 1663, represents the fierce 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1^5 

reaction which had set in against Puritanism. It is 
justly famed for wit, learning, good sense, and ingenious 
drollery, and, in accordance with the new criticism, it is 
absolutely without obscurity. It is often as terse as 
Pope's best work. But it is too long, its wit wearies us 
at last, and it undoes the force of its attack on the Puri- 
tans by its exaggeration. Satire should have at least the 
semblance of truth ; yet Butler calls the Puritans cow- 
ards. We turn now to the greatest of these poets in 
whom poetry is founded on intellect rather than on feel- 
ing, and whose verse is mostly devoted to argument and 
satire. 

109. John Dryden was the first of the new, as Milton 
was the last of the elder, school of poetry. It was late in 
life that he gained fame. Born in 1631, he was a Crom- 
wellite till the Restoration, when he began the changes 
which mark his hfe. His poem on the death of the Pro- 
tector was soon followed by the Astrcea Redux, which 
celebrated the return of Justice to the realm in the per- 
son of Charles II. The Annus Mirabilis appeared in 
1667, and in this his metrical ease was first clearly marked. 
But his power of exact reasoning expressing itself with 
powerful and ardent ease in a rapid succession of con- 
densed thoughts in verse, was not shown (save in drama) 
till he was fifty years old, in the first part of Absalom and 
Achitophel, the foremost of Enghsh satires. He had been 
a play writer for fourteen years, till its appearance in 1681, 
and the rhymed plays which he had written enabled him 
to perfect the versification which is now so remarkable 



176 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

in his work. The satire itself, written in mockery of the 
Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill, attacked Shaftesbury 
as x^chitophel, was kind to Monmouth as Absalom, and 
in its sketch of Buckingham as Zimri the poet avenged 
himself for the Rehearsal. It was the first fine example 
of that party poetry which became still more bitter and 
personal in the hands of Pope. It was followed by the 
Medal, a new attack on Shaftesbury, and the Mac Fleck- 
noe, 1682, in which Shad well, a rival poet, who had sup- 
ported Shaftesbury's party, was made the witless successor 
of Richard Flecknoe, a poet of all kinds of poetry, and 
master of none. Then in the same year, after the arrest 
of Monmouth, the second part of Absalom and Achito- 
phel appeared, all of which, except two hundred hnes, 
was written by Nahum Tate. These were four terrible 
masterpieces of ruthless wit and portraiture. Then he 
turned to express his transient theology in verse, and the 
Religio Laid, 1682, defends and states the argument for 
the Church of England. It was perhaps poverty that led 
him to change his religion, and the Hind and Panthej-, 
1687, is a model of melodious reasoning in behalf of the 
milk-white hind of the Church of Rome. The Dissenters 
are mercilessly treated under the image of the baser 
beasts ; while at first the Panther, the Church of Eng- 
land, is gently touched, but in the end lashed with sever- 
ity. However, Hind and Panther tell, at the close, two 
charming stones to one another. It produced in reply 
one of the happiest burlesques in Enghsh poetry. The 
Country Mouse and the City Mouse, the work of Charles 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE I// 

Montague (Lord Halifax), and Mat Prior. Deprived of 
his offices at the Revolution, Dryden turned again to the 
drama and to prose, but the failure of the last of his good 
plays in 1694, drove him again from the stage, and he 
gave himself up to his Translation of Virgil which he 
published in 1697. As a narrative poet his Fables, 
Ancient and Modern, finished late in life, in 1699, give 
him a high rank in this class of poetry. They sin from 
coarseness, but in style, in magnificent march of verse, 
in intellectual but not imaginative fire, in ease but not 
in grace, they are excellent. As a lyric poet his. fame 
rests on the animated Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687, 
and on Alexander's Feast, 1697. From Milton's death, 
1674, till his own in 1700, Dryden reigned undisputed, 
and round his throne in Will's Coffeehouse, where he sat 
as " Glorious John," we may place the names of the lesser 
poets, the Earls of Dorset, Roscommon, ami Mulgrave, 
Sir Charles Sedley, and the Earl of Rochester. The 
lighter poetry of the court lived on in the two last. John 
Oldham won a short fame by his Satire on the Jesuits, 
1679; ^^^ Bishop Ken, 1668, established, in his Morn- 
ing and Evening Hymns, a new type of religious poetry. 

no. Prose Literature of the Restoration and Revolu- 
tion. Criticism. — As Dryden was now first in poetry, so 
he was in prose. No one can understand the poetry of 
this time, in its relation to the past, to tlie future, and 
to France, who does not read the Critical Essays pre- 
fixed to his dramas, On the Historical Poejn, on dramatic 
rhymC; on Heroic Plays, on the classical writers, and his 



178 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Essay on Dramatic Poetry. He is in these essays, not 
only the leader of modern literary criticism, but the 
leader of that modern prose in which the style is easy, 
unaffected, moulded to the subject, and in which the 
proper words are put in the proper places. Dryden was 
a great originator. 

III. Science. — During the Civil War the rehgious 
and poHtical struggle absorbed the country, but yet, 
apart from the strife, a few men who cared for scien- 
tific matters met at one another's houses. Out of this 
little knot, after the Restoration, arose the Royal Society, 
embodied in 1662. Astronomy, experimental chemistry, 
medicine, mineralogy, zoology, botany, vegetable physi- 
ology, were all founded as studies, and their hterature 
begun, in the age of the Restoration. One man's work 
was so great in science as to merit his name being men- 
tioned ampng the Hterary men of England. In 167 1 
Isaac Newton laid his Theory of Light before the Royal 
Society ; in the year before the Revolution his Pnticipia 
established, by its proof of the theory of gravitation, the 
true system of the universe. 

It was in political and religious knowledge, however, 
that the intellectual inquiry of the nation was most 
shown. When the thinking spirit succeeds the active 
and adventurous in a people, one of the first things they 
will think upon is the true method and grounds of gov- 
ernment, both divine and human. Two sides will be 
taken : the side of authority and the side of reason in 
Religion ; the side of authority and the side of indi- 
t^iduaJ Wh^Jty in Politics. 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1/9 

112. The Theological Literature of those who declared 
that reason was supreme as a test of truth, arose with 
some men who met at Lord Falkland's just before the 
Civil War, and especially with John Hales and WilHam 
Chilhngworth. The same kind of work, though modified 
towards more sedateness of expression, and less rational- 
istic, was now done by Archbishop Tillotson, and Bishop 
Burnet. In 1678, Cudworth's Intellectual System of the 
Universe is perhaps the best book on the controversy 
which then took form against those who were called 
Atheists. A number of divines in the English Church 
took sides for Authority or Reason, or opposed the 
growing Deism during the latter half of the seventeenth 
century. It was an age of preachers, and Isaac Barrow, 
Newton's predecessor in the chair of mathematics at 
Cambridge, could preach, with grave and copious elo- 
quence, for three hours at a time. Theological prose 
was strengthened by the publication of the sermons of 
Edward Sdllingfleet and William Sherlock, and their 
adversary, Robert South, was as witty in rhetoric as 
he was fierce in controversy. 

113. Political Literature. — The resistance to authority 
in the opposition to the theory of the Divine Right of 
Kings did not much enter into literature till after the 
severe blow that theory received in the Civil War. Dur- 
ing the Commonwealth and after the Restoration the 
struggle took the form of a discussion on the abstract 
question of the Science of Government, and was mingled 
with an inquiry into the origin of society and the ground 



lSO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

of social life. Thomas Hobbes, during the Common- 
wealth, was the first who dealt with the question from 
the side of abstract reason, and he is also, before Dryden, 
the first of all our prose writers whose style may be said 
to be uniform and correct, and adapted carefully to the 
subjects on which he wrote. His treatise, the Leviathan, 
165 1, declared (i) that the origin of all power was in 
the people, and (2) that the end of all power was the 
commonweal. It destroyed the theory of a Divine 
Right of Kings and Priests, but it created another kind 
of Divine Right when it said that the power lodged in 
rulers by the people could not be taken away by the 
people. Sir R. Filmer supported the side of Divine 
Right in his Patriarcha, pubhshed 1680. Henry Nevile, 
in his Dialogue concerning Govern7nent, and James Har- 
rington in his romance. The Commonwealth of Oceana, 
published at the beginning of the Commonwealth, con- 
tended that all secure government was to be based on 
property, but Nevile supported a monarchy, and Har- 
rington — with whom I may class Algernon Sidney, whose 
political treatise on government is as statesmanlike as it 
is finely written — a democracy, on this basis. I may 
here mention that it was during this period, in 1667, that 
the first effort was made after a Science of Political 
Economy by Sir William Petty in his Treatise on Taxes. 
Th.Q political pamphlet \N^?> also begun at this time by Sir 
Roger L'Estrange, and George Savile, Lord Hahfax. 

114. John Locke, after the Revolution, in 1690, fol- 
lowed the two doctrines of Hobbes in his treatises on 



V^I RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE l8l 

Civil Government, but with these important additions — 
(i) that the people have a right to take away the power 
given by them to the ruler, (2) that the ruler is respon- 
sible to the people for the trust reposed in him, and (3) 
that legislative assemblies are Supreme as the voice of 
the people. This was the political philosophy of the 
Revolution. Locke carried the same spirit of free in- 
quiry into the realm of religion, and in his Letters on 
Toleration laid down the philosophical grounds for lib- 
erty of religious thought. He finished by entering the 
realm of metaphysical inquiry. In 1690 appeared his 
Essay concerning the Human Understanding, in which 
he investigated its limits, and traced all ideas, and there- 
fore all knowledge, to experience. In his clear state- 
ment of the way in which the Understanding works, in 
the way in which he guarded it and Language against 
their errors in the inquiry after truth, he did almost as 
much for the true method of thinking as Bacon had done 
for the science of nature. 

115. The intellectual stir of the time produced, apart 
from the great movement of thought, a good deal of 
Miscellaneous Literature. The painting of short " char- 
acters " was carried on after the Restoration by Samuel 
Butler and W\ Charleton. These " characters " had no 
personality, but as party spirit deepened, names thinly 
disguised were given to characters drawn of hving men, 
and Dryden and Pope in poetry, and all the prose wits 
of the time of Queen Anne and George I., made per- 
sonal and often violent sketches of their opponents a 



1 82 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAl*. 

special element in literature. On the other hand, Izaak 
Walton's Lives, in 1670, are examples of kind, agreeably 
and careful Biography. Cowley's small volume, written 
shortly before his death in 1667, gave richness to the 
Essay, and its prose almost anticipated the prose of Dry- 
den. John Evelyn"s multitudinous writings are them- 
selves a miscellany. He wrote on painting, sculpture, 
architecture, timber (the Sylvd), on gardening, com- 
merce, and he illustrates the searching spirit of the age. 
In William IIL's time Sir William Temple's pleasant 
Essays bring us in style and tone nearer to the great 
class of essayists of whom Addison was chief. Lady 
Rachel Russell's Letters begin the Letter-writing liter- 
ature of England. Pepys (1660-9), and Evelyn, whose 
Diary grows full after 1640, gave rise to that class of gos- 
siping Memoirs which has be n of so much use in giving 
colour to history. History itself at this time is httle 
better than memoirs, and such a name may be fairly 
given to Bishop Burnet's History of his Own Time and 
to his History of the Reformation. Finally Classical 
Criticism, in the discussion on the genuineness of the 
Letters of Phalaris, was created by Richard Bentley in 
1697-9. Literature was therefore plentiful. It was 
also correct, but it was not inventive. 

116. The Literature of Queen Anne and the First 
Georges. — Witi^ che closing years of William III. and 
the accession of Queen Anne (1702) a literature arose 
which was partly new and partly a continuance of that 
of the Restoration. The conflict between those who 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 83 

took the oath to the new dynasty and the Nonjurors who 
refused, the hot blood that it produced, the war between 
Dissent and Church, and between the two parties which 
now took the names of Whig and Tory, produced a mass 
of poHtical pamphlets, of which Daniel Defoe's and 
Swift's were the best ; of songs and ballads, like Lillibul- 
lero, which were sung in every street ; of squibs, reviews, 
of satirical poems and letters. Every one joined in it, 
and it rose to importance in the work of the greater men 
who mingled hterary studies with their political excite- 
ment. In poHtics, all the abstract discussions we have 
mentioned ^eased to be abstract, and became personal 
and practical, and the spirit of inquiry applied itself more 
closely to .he questions of every-day life. The whole of 
this stirring literary life was concentrated in London, 
where the agitation of society was hottest ; and it is 
round this vivid ity life that the literature of Queen 
Anne and the two following reigns is best grouped. 

117. It was, with a few exceptions, a Party Literature. 
The Whig and Tory leaders enlisted on their sides the 
best poets and prose writers, who fiercely satirised and 
unduly praised them under names thinly disguised. Our 
" Augustan Age " was an age of unbridled slander. Per- 
sonaHties were sent to and fro like shots in battle. Those 
who could do this work well were well rewarded, but the 
rank and file of writers were left to starve. Literature 
was thus honoured not for itself, but for the sake of party. 
The result was that the abler men lowered it by making 
it a political tool, and the smaller men, the fry of Grub 



184 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Street, degraded it by using it in the same way, only in a 
baser manner. Their flattery was as abject as their abuse 
was shameless, and both were stupid. They received and 
deserved the merciless lashing which Pope was soon to 
give them in the Dunciad. Being a party literature, it 
naturally came to study and to look sharply into human 
character and into human Kfe as seen in the great city. 
It debated subjects of literary and scientific inquiry and 
of philosophy with great abihty, but without depth. It 
discussed all the varieties of social life, and painted town 
society more vividly than has been done before or since ; 
and it was so wholly taken up with this, that country life 
and its interests, except in the writings of Addison, were 
scarcely touched by it at all. Criticism being so active, 
the for77i in which thought was expressed was now espe- 
cially dwelt on, and the result was that the style of English 
prose became even more simple than in Dryden's hands ; 
and English verse, leaving Dryden's power behind it, 
reached a neatness of expression as exquisite as it was 
artificial. At the same time, and for the same reasons, 
Nature, Passion, and Imagination decayed in poetry. 

118. Alexander Pope absorbed and reflected all these 
elements. Born in 1688, he wrote tolerable verse at 
twelve years old ; the Pastorals appeared in 1 709, and 
two years afterwards he took full rank as the critical poet 
in the Essay on Criticism. (1711). The next year saw 
the first cast of his Rape of the Lock, the most brilliant 
occasional poem in our language. This closed what we 
may call his first period. In 1712 his sacred pastoral, 



n RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 18$ 

The Messiah, appeared, and in 17 13, when he published 
Windsoi' Forest, he became known to Swift and to Henry 
St. John, Lord Bohngbroke. When these, with Gay, 
Parnell, Prior, Arbuthnot, and others, formed the Scrib- 
lerus Club, Pope joined them, and soon rose into great 
fame by his Translation of the Iliad (1715-20), and by 
the Translation of the Odyssey (1723-5), in which he 
was assisted by Fenton and Broome. Being now at ease, 
for he received fully 9000/. for this work, he published 
from his retreat at Twickenham, and in bitter scorn of 
the poetasters and of all the petty scribblers who annoyed 
him, the Dunciad, 1728. Its original hero was Lewis 
Theobald, but when the fourth book was published, under 
Warburton's influence, in 1742, Colley Gibber was en- 
throned as the King of Dunces instead of Theobald. 
The fiercest and finest of Pope's satires, it closes his 
second period which breathes the savageness of Swift. 
The third phase of Pope's hterary life was closely linked 
to his friend Bohngbroke. It was in conversation with 
him that he originated the Essay on Man (1732-4) and 
the Iinltatio7is of Horace. The Moj-al Essays, or Epis- 
tles to men and women, were written to praise those 
whom he loved, and to satirise the bad poets and the 
social follies of the day, and all who disliked him or his 
party. Among these, who has not read the Epistle to 
Dr. Arbuthnot? In the last few years of his Hfe, Bishop 
Warburton, the writer of the Legation of Moses and 
editor of Shakespeare, helped him to fit the Moral 
Essays into the plan of which the Essay on Man formed 



1 86 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

part. Warburton was Pope's last great friend ; but 
almost his only old friend. By 1740 nearly all the 
members of his literary circle were dead, and a new 
race of poets and writers had grown up. In 1744 he 
died. His Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady and the 
Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard show how he once tried 
to handle the passions of sorrow and love. The mas- 
terly form into which he threw the philosophical prin- 
ciples he condensed into didactic poetry make them 
more impressive than they have a right to be. The 
Essay on Man, though its philosophy is poor and not 
his own, is crowded with lines that have passed into 
daily use. The Essay on Criticism is equally full of 
critical precepts put with exquisite skill. The Satires 
and Epistles are didactic, but their excellence is in the 
terse and finished types of character, in the almost cre- 
ative drawing of which Pope remains unrivalled, even by 
Dryden. His translation of Homer resembles Homer 
as much as London resembled Troy, or Marlborough 
Achilles, or Queen Anne Hecuba. It is done with great 
literary art, but for that very reason it does not make us 
feel the simplicity and directness of his original. It has 
neither the manner nor the spirit of the Greek, just as 
Pope's descriptions of nature have neither the manner 
nor the spirit of nature. The heroic coii^plet, in which he 
wrote nearly all his work, he used with a correctness that 
has never been surpassed, but its smooth perfection, at 
length, wearies the ear. It wants the breaks that passion 
and imagination naturally make. Finally, he had the 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 87 

Spirit of an artist, hating those who degraded his art, and 
at a time when men followed it for money, and place, 
and the applause of the club and of the town, he loved 
it faithfully to the end, for its own sake. 

119. The Minor Poets who surrounded Pope in the 
first two-thirds of his Hfe did not approach his genius. 
Richard Blackmore endeavoured to restore the epic in 
his Prince Arthur, 1695, ^^^ Samuel Garth's mock heroic 
poem of the Dispensary appeared along with John Pom- 
fret's poems in 1699. In 1701, Defoe's Triieborn Eng- 
lishman defended William III. against those who said he 
was a foreigner, and Prior's finest ode, the Carmen Secu- 
lare, took up the same cause. John Phihps is known by 
his Miltonic burlesque of The Splendid Shilling, and his 
Cyder was a Georgic of the apple. Matthew Green's 
Spleen 2ind Ambrose Philip's Pastorals y7QXQ contempo- 
rary with Pope's first poetry ; and John Gay's Shepherd^ s 
Week, six pastorals, 1714, were as lightly wrought as his 
famous Fables. He had a true vein of happy song, and 
Black-eyed Susan remains with the Beggars' Opera to 
please us still. The political poems of Swift were coarse, 
but always hit home. Addison celebrated the Battle of 
Blenheim in the Campaign, and his cultivated grace is 
found in some devotional pieces. On his death Thomas 
Tickell made a noble elegy. Prior's charming ease is 
best shown in the Hght narrative poetry which we may say 
began with him in the reign of WiUiam III. In Pope's 
later life a new and quickening impulse came upon poetry, 
and changed it root and branch. It arose in Ramsay's 



l88 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAJr 

Gentle Shephe7'd, 1725, and in Thomson's Seasons, 1730, 
and it rang the knell of the manner and the spirit of the 
critical school. 

120. The Prose Literature of Pope's time collects 
itself round four great names, Swift, Defoe, Addison, and 
Bishop Berkeley, and they all exhibit those elements of 
the age of which I have spoken. Jonathan Swifi^ was 
the keenest of political partisans, for his fierce and 
earnest personality made everything he did impassioned. 
But he was far more than a partisan. He was the most 
original prose writer of his time — the man of genius among 
many men of talent. It was not till he was thirty years 
old, 1697, that he wrote the Battle of the Books, concern- 
ing the so-called Letters of Phalaris, and the Tale of a 
Tub, a satire on the Dissenters, the Papists, and even the 
Church of England. These books, published in 1704, 
made his reputation. He soon became the finest and 
most copious writer of pamphlets England had ever 
known. At first he supported the Whigs, but left them 
for the new Tory party in 17 10, and his tracts brought 
him court favour, while his hterary fame was increased 
by many witty letters, poems, and arguments. On the 
fall of the Tory party at the accession of George I., 17 14, 
he retired to the Deanery of St. Patrick in Ireland, an 
embittered man, and the Drapier's Lette?'s, 1724, writ- 
ten against Wood's halfpence, gained him popularity in 
a country that he hated. In 1726 his inventive genius, 
his savage satire, and his cruel indignation with life were 
all shown in Gulliver's Travels. The voyage to Lilliput 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE iSQ 

and Brobdingnag satirised the politics and manners of 
England and Europe ; that to Laputa mocked the philoso- 
phers ; and the last, to the country of the Houyhnhnms, 
lacerated and defiled the whole body of humanity. No 
English is more robust than Swift's, no life in private 
and public more sad and proud, no death more pitiable. 
He died in 1745 hopelessly insane. Daniel Defoe's 
vein as a pamphleteer seems to have been inexhaustible, 
and the style of his tracts was as roughly persuasive as 
it was popular. Above all he was the journalist. His 
Review, published twice a week for a year, was wholly 
written by himself; but he "founded, conducted, and 
wrote for a host of other newspapers," and filled them 
with every subject of the day. His tales grew out of 
matters treated of in his journals, and his best art lay 
in the way he built up these stories out of mere sug- 
gestions. '' The little art he is truly master of," said one 
of his contemporaries, " is of forging a story and impos- 
ing it on the world for truth." His circumstantial inven- 
tion, combined with a style which exactly fits it by its 
simplicity, is the root of the charm of the great story 
by which he chiefly lives in literature. Robinson Crusoe, 
1 719, equalled Gulliver's Travels in truthful representa- 
tion, and excelled them in invention. The story lives 
and charms from day to day. But none of his stories 
are real novels ; that is, they have no plot to the working 
out of which the characters and the events contribute. 
They form the transition, however, from the sHght tale 
and the romance of the Elizabethan time to the finished 
novel of Richardson and Fielding. 



IQO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA^ 

121. Metaphysical Literature, which drifted into the- 
ology, was enriched by the work of Bishop Berkeley. 
The Platonic dialogue of Hylas and Philonous, 17 13, 
charms us even more than his subtle and elastic Siris, 
1 744. These books, with Alciphi^on, the MimUe Philoso- 
pher^ 1732, questioned the real existence of matter, — 
"no idea can exist," he said, ''out of the mind," — and 
founded on the denial of it an answer to the English 
Deists, round whom in the first half of the eighteenth 
century centred the struggle between the claims of nat- 
ural and revealed religion. The influence of Shaftes- 
bury's Characteristics, 1711, was far more literary than 
metaphysical. He condemned metaphysics, but his phi- 
losophy, such as it was, inspired Pope, and his cultivated 
thinking on several subjects made many writers in the 
next generation care for beauty and grace. He, Hke 
Bolingbroke, and Wollaston, Tindal, Toland, and Collins, 
on the Deists' side, were opposed by Samuel Clark, by 
Bentley, by Bishop Butler, and by Bishop Warburton. 
Bishop Butler's acute and solid reasoning treated in 
his Ser??ions the subject of Morals, inquiring what was 
the particular nature of man, and hence determining the 
course of life correspondent to this nature. His Analogy 
of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and 
Course of Nature, 1736, endeavours to make peace be- 
tween authority and reason, and has become a standard 
book. I may mention here a social satire, The Fable oj 
the Bees, by Mandeville, half-poem, half-prose dialogue, 
and finished in 1729. It tried to prove that the vices 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE IQI 

of society are the foundation of civilisation, and is one 
of the first of a new set of books which marked the rise 
in England of the bold speculations on the nature and 
ground of society to which the French Revolution gave 
afterwards so great an impulse. 

12 2. The Periodical Essay is connected with the 
names of Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele. 
The gay, light, graceful, literary Essay, differing from 
such Essays as Bacon's as good conversation about a 
subject differs from a clear analysis of all its points, was 
begun in France by Montaigne in 1580. Charles Cot- 
ton, a wit of Charles II. 's time, retranslated Montaigne's 
Essays, and they soon found imitators in Cowley and 
Sir W. Temple. But the periodical Essay was created 
by Steele and Addison. It was at first published three 
times a week, then daily, and it was anonymous, and 
both these characters necessarily changed its form from 
that of an essay by Montaigne. Steele began it in the 
Tatler, \ 709, and it treated of everything that was going 
on in the town. He paints as a social humourist the 
whole age of Queen Anne — the pohtical and literary 
disputes, the fine gentlemen and ladies, the characters 
of men, the humours of society, the new book, the new 
play ; we live in the very streets and drawing-rooms of 
old London. Addison soon joined him, first in the Tal- 
ler, afterwards in the Spectator, 1711. His work is more 
critical, literary, and didactic than his companion's. The 
characters he introduces, such as Sir Roger de Coverley, 
are finished studies after nature. The humour is very 



192 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

fine and tender ; and, like Chaucer's, it is never bitter. 
The style adds to the charm : in its varied cadence and 
subtle ease it has not been surpassed within its own 
peculiar sphere in England ; and it seems to grow out 
of the subjects treated of. Addison's work was a great 
one, lightly done. The Spectator, the Guardian, and the 
Freeholder, in his hands, gave a better tone to manners, 
and hence to morals, and a gentler one to political and 
literary criticism. The essays published every Friday 
were chiefly on literary subjects, the Saturday essays 
chiefly on religious subjects. The former popularised 
literature, so that culture spread among the middle 
classes and crept down to the country ; the latter popu- 
larised religion. " I have brought," he says, " philosophy 
out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell 
in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." 

THE DRAMA, FROM THE RESTORATION TO 1780 

123. The Drama after the Restoration took the tone 
of the court both in politics and religion, but its partisan- 
ship decayed under William III., and died in the reign 
of Queen Anne. The court of Charles II., which the 
plays now written represented much more than they did 
the national life, gave the drama the "genteel" ease 
and the immorality of its society, and encouraged it 
to find new impulses from the tragedy and comedy of 
Spain and of France. The French romances of the 
school of Calprenede and Scudery furnished plots to 
the playwriters. The great French dramatists, Corneille, 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE I93 

Racine, and Moliere, were translated and borrowed from 
again and again. The " three unities " of Corneille, and 
rhyme instead of blank verse as the vehicle of tragedy, 
were adopted, but " the spirit of neither the serious nor 
the comic drama of France could then be transplanted 
into England." 

Two acting companies were formed on Charles II. 's 
return, under Thomas Killigrew and Davenant ; actresses 
came on the stage for the first time, the ballet was intro- 
duced, and scenery began to be largely used. Dryden, 
whose masterly force was sure to strike the key-note that 
others followed, began his comedies in 1663, but turned 
to tragedy in the Indian Queen, 1664. This play, with 
the Indian Emperour, established for fourteen years the 
rhymed couplet as the dramatic verse. His defence of 
rhyme in the Essay on Dramatic Poesy asserted the 
originality of the English school, and denied that it fol- 
lowed the French. The Maiden Queen, 1667, brought 
him new fame, and then Tyrannic Love and the Con- 
quest of Granada, 1672, induced the burlesque of the 
Rehearsal, written by the Duke of Buckingham, in which 
the bombastic extravagance of these heroic plays was 
ridiculed. Dryden now changed, in 1678, his dramatic 
manner, and following Shakespeare, " disencumbered 
himself from rhyme" in his fine tragedy o{ All for Love, 
and showed what power he had of low comedy in the 
Spanish Friar. After the Revolution, his tragedy of 
Don Sebastian ranks high, but not higher than his brill- 
iantly written comedy of Amphitryon, 1690. Dryden is 



194 ENGLISH LITERATURE ^ CHAP. 

the representative dramatist of the Restoration. Among 
the tragedians who followed his method and possessed 
their own, those most worthy of notice are Nat Lee, 
whose Rival Queens^ 1667, deserves its praise; Thomas 
Otway, whose two pathetic tragedies, the Orphan and 
Venice Preserved, still keep the stage ; Thomas Southerne 
whose Fatal Marriage, 1694, was revived by Garrick; 
and Congreve who once turned from comedy to write 
The Mourning Bride. 

It was in comedy, however, that the dramatists ex- 
celled. Sir George Etherege originated with great skill 
the new comedy of England with She Would if She 
Could, 1668. Sedley, Mrs. Behn, Lacy, and Shadwell 
carry on to the Revolution that light Comedy of Man- 
ners which William Wycherley's gross vigour and natural 
plots lifted into an odious excellence in such plays as the 
Cotmtry Wife and the Plain Dealer. Three great come- 
dians followed Wycherley — William Congreve, whose 
well-bred ease is almost as remarkable as his brilliant 
wit ; Sir John Vanbrugh, and George Farquhar, both of 
whom have quick invention, gaiety, dash, and sincerity. 
The indecency of all these writers belongs to the time, 
but it is partly forgotten in their swift and sustained 
vivacity. This immorality produced Jeremy Collier's 
famous attack on the stage, 1698; and the growth of 
a higher tone in society, uniting with this attack, began 
to purify the drama, though Mrs. Centlivre's comedies, 
during the reign of Queen Anne, show no love of purity^ 
Steele, at this time, whose Lying Lover makes him the 



► 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 95 

father of Sentimental comedy, wrote all his plays with 
a moral purpose. Nicholas Rowe, whose melancholy 
tragedies " are occupied with themes of heroic love," is 
dull, but never gross ; while Addison's ponderous tragedy 
of Cato, 1 713, praised by Voltaire as the first tragedie 
raisonnable, marks, in its total rejection of the drama of 
nature for the classical style, " a definite epoch in the 
history of English tragedy, an epoch of decay, on which 
no recovery has followed." Comedy, however, had still 
a future. The Beggars'' Opera of Gay, 1728, revived an 
old form of drama in a new way. Colley Gibber carried 
on into George II. 's time the fight and the sentimental 
comedy ; Fielding made the stage the vehicle of criticism 
on the folfies, literature, and politics of his time ; and Foote 
and Garrick did the same kind of work in their farces. 

The influence of the Restoration drama continues, past 
this period, in the manner of Goldsmith and Sheridan 
who wrote between 1768 and 1778; but the lambent 
humour of Goldsmith's Good-natured Ma7i and She 
Stoops to Conquer, and the wit, almost as brilliant and 
more epigrammatic than Congreve's, of Sheridan's Rivals 
and the School for Scandal, are not deformed by the 
indecency of the Restoration. Both were Irishmen, but 
Goldsmith has more of the Celtic grace and Sheridan 
of the Celtic wit. The sentimental comedy was carried 
on into the next age by Macklin, Murphy, Cumberland, 
the Colmans, and many others, but we may say that with 
Sheridan the history of the elder English Drama closes. 
That which belongs to our century is a different thing. 



196 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 



CHAPTER VII 

PROSE LITERATURE FROM THE DEATH OF POPE AND OF 
SWIFT TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, AND FROM THE 
FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTl^ 
1745-1789-1832 

124. Prose Literature. — The rapid increase of manu- 
factures, science, and prosperity which began with the 
middle of the eighteenth century is paralleled by the 
growth of Literature. The general causes of this growth 
were — 

ist, That a good prose style had bee7i perfected^ and 
the method of writing being made easy, production in- 
creased. Men were born, as it were, into a good school 
of the art of composition. 

2ndly, The long peace after the accession of the House 
of Hanover had left England at rest, and given it wealth. 
The reclaiming of waste tracts, the increased population 
and trade, made better communication necessary ; and 
the country was soon covered with a network of high- 
ways. The leisure gave time to men to think and 
write ; the quicker interchange between the capital and 
the country spread over England the literature of the 
capital, and stirred men everywhere to express their 



Vli PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 IQJ* 

thoughts. The coaching services and the post carried 
the new book and the hterary criticism to the villages, 
and awoke the men of talent there, who might otherwise 
have been silent. 

3rdly, The Press sent far and wide the news of the 
day, and grew in importance till it contained the opinions 
and writings of men like Johnson. Such seed produced 
literary work in the country. Newspapers now began 
to play a larger part in literature. They rose under the 
Commonwealth, but became important when the censor- 
ship which reduced them to a mere broadsheet of news 
was removed after the Revolution of 1688. The polid- 
cal sleep of the age of the two first Georges hindered 
their progress ; but in the reign of George III., after a 
struggle with which the name of John Wilkes and the 
author of the Letters of Junius are connected, and 
which lasted from 1764 to 1771, the press claimed and 
obtained the right to criticise the conduct and measures 
of ministers and the king ; and the further right to 
pubHsh and comment on the debates in the two Houses. 

4thly, Communication with the Continent had in- 
creased during the peaceable times of Walpole, and 
the wars that followed made it still more common. 
With its increase two new and great outbursts of litera- 
ture told upon England. France sent the works of 
Montesquieu, of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alem- 
bert, and the rest of the liberal thinkers who were 
called the Encyclopaedists, to influence and quicken 
English hterature on all the great subjects that belong 



198 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

to the social and political life of man. Afterwards, 
the fresh German movement, led by Lessing and others, 
and carried on by Goethe and Schiller, added its impulse 
to the poetical school that arose in England along with 
the French Revolution. These were the general causes 
of the rapid growth of literature from the time of the 
death of Swift and of Pope. 

125, Prose Literature between 1745 and the French 
Revolution may be said to be bound up with the literary 
lives of one man and his friends. Samuel Johnson, 
born in 1709, and whose first important prose work, 
the Life of Savage, appeared in 1744, was the last 
representative of the literary king, who, hke Dryden 
and Pope, held a court in London. Poor and un- 
known, he worked his way to fame, and his first poem, 
the Londofi, 1738, satirised the town where he loved to 
live. His longer and better poem, The Vanity of 
Human Wishes, was pubhshed in 1749, and his moral 
power was never better shown than in its weighty verse. 
His one play, Ire7ie, was acted in the same year. He 
carried on the periodical essays in the Ramble?-, 1750-2, 
but in it, as afterwards in the Idler, grace and lightness, 
the essence of this kind of essay, were lost. Driven 
by poverty, Johnson undertook a greater work : the 
Dictionai-y of the English Language, 1755, and his 
celebrated letter to Lord Chesterfield, concerning its 
publication, gave the death-blow to patronage, and 
makes Johnson the first of the modern literary men 
who, independent of patrons, live by their pen and find 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 1 99 

in the public their only paymaster. He represents thus 
a new class. In 1759 he set on foot the Didactic Novel 
in Rasselas. For a time he was one of the poHtical 
pamphleteers, from 1770 to 1776. As he drew near to 
his death his Lives of the Poets appeared as prefaces 
to his edition of the poets in 1781, and lifted biography 
into a higher place in literature. But he did even more 
for literature as a converser, as the chief talker of a 
literary club, than by writing, and we know exactly what 
a power he was by the vivid Biography, the best in our 
language, which James Boswell, with fussy devotedness, 
made of his master in 1791. Side by side with Johnson 
stands Oliver Goldsmith, whose graceful and pure 
Enghsh is a pleasant contrast to the loaded Latinism of 
Johnson's style. The Vicar of Wakefield, the History 
of Animated Natu7'e, are at one in charm, and the 
latter is full of that love of natural scenery, the senti- 
ment of which is absent from Johnson's Journey to 
the Westerft Isles. Both these men were masters of 
Miscellaneous Literature, and in that class, I mention 
here, as belonging to the latter half of the eighteenth 
century, Edmund Burke's Vindication of Natural So- 
ciety, a parody of Bolingbroke ; and his Inquiry into 
the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful^ 
a book which in 1757 introduced him to Johnson. Nor 
ought we to forget Sir Joshua Reynolds, another of 
Johnson's friends, who first made English art literary 
in his Discourses on Fainting; nor Horace Walpole, 
whose Anecdotes of Painting, 1762-71, still please; 



200 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA» 

and whose familiar Letters, malicious, light as froth, but 
amusing, retail with livehness all the gossip of the time. 
Among all these books on the intellectual subjects of hfe 
arose to delight the lovers of quiet and the country the 
Natural History of Selborne, by Gilbert White. His 
seeing eye and gentle heart are imaged in his fresh 
and happy style. 

126. The Novel. — "There is more knowledge of the 
heart," said Johnson, " in one letter of Richardson's than 
in all Tom Jones,''^ and the saying introduces Samuel 
Richardson and Henry Fielding, the makers of the 
modern novel. Wholly distinct from merely narrative 
stories like Defoe's, the true novel is a story wrought 
round the passion of love to a tragic or joyous conclusion. 
But the name is appHed now to any story of human life 
which is woven by the action of characters or of events 
on characters to a chosen conclusion. Its form, far more 
flexible than that of the drama, admits of almost infinite 
development. The whole of human life, at any time, at 
any place in the world, is its subject, and its vast sphere 
accounts for its vast production. Pamela, 1741, appeared 
while Pope was yet alive, and was the first of Richardson's 
novels. Like Clajissa Harlowe, 1 748, it was written in 
the form of letters. The third of these books was Sir 
Charles Grandison. They are novels of Sentiment, and 
their purposeful morality and religion mark the change 
which had taken place in the morals and faith of litera- 
ture since the preceding age. 

Clarissa Harlowe is a masterpiece in its kind. Rich< 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 201 

ardson himself is mastered day by day by the passionate 
creation of his characters : and their variety and the 
variety of their feeUngs are drawn with a slow, diffusive, 
elaborate intensity which penetrates into the subtlest 
windings of the human heart. But all the characters are 
grouped round and enhghten Clarissa, the pure and 
ideal star of womanhood. The pathos of the book, its 
sincerity, its minute reality, have always, but slowly^ Im- 
passioned its readers, and it stirred as absorbing an 
interest in France as it did in England. "Take care," 
said Diderot, '^ not to open these enchanting books, if 
you have any duties to fulfil." Henry Fielding followed 
Pamela with Joseph Andrews^ 1742, and Clarissa with 
Tom Jones, 1749. At the same time, in 1748, appeared 
Tobias Smollett's first novel, Rode?ick Random. Both 
wrote many other stories, but in the natural growth and 
development of the story, and in the infitting of the 
characters and events towards the conclusion, Tom 
Jones is said to be the English model of the novel. The 
constructive power of Fielding is absent from Smollett, 
but in inventive tale-telling and in cynical characterisa- 
tion, he is not easily equalled. Fielding, a master of 
observing and of recording what he observed, draws 
English life both in town and country with a coarse and 
realistic pencil : Smollett is led beyond the truth of 
nature into caricature. Ten years had thus sufficed to 
create a wholly new literature. 

Laurence Sterne published the first part of Tristram 
Shandy \n the same year as Rasselas, 1759. Tristram 



202 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Shandy and the Sentimental Journey are scarcely novels. 
They have no plot, they can scarcely be said to have any 
story. The story of Tristram Shandy wanders like a 
man in a labyrinth, and the humour is as labyrinthine 
as the story. It is carefully invented, and whimsically 
subtle ; and the sentiment is sometimes true, but mostly 
affected. But a certain unity is given to the book by the 
admirable consistency of the characters. A little later, in 
1766, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield was the first and, 
perhaps, the most charming, of all those novels which we 
may call idyUic, which describe in a pure and gentle style 
the simple loves and lives of country people. Lastly, but 
still in the same circle of Johnson's friends, Miss Burney's 
Evelina, 1778, and her Cecilia, in which we detect John- 
son's Roman hand, were the first novels of society. 

127. History shared in the progress made after 1745 
in prose writing, and was raised into the rank of literature 
by three of Johnson's contemporaries. All of them were 
influenced by the French school, by Montesquieu and 
Voltaire. David Hume's History of England, finished 
in 1 76 1, is, in the writer's endeavour to make it a philo- 
sophic whole, in its clearness of narrative and purity of 
style, our first literary history. But he is neither exact, 
nor does he care to be exact. He does not love his sub- 
ject, and he wants sympathy with mankind and with his 
country. His manner is the manner of Voltaire, passion- 
less, keen, and elegant. Dr. Robertson, Hume's friend, 
was a careful and serious but also a cold writer. His 
histories of Scotland, of Charles V., and of America 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 203 

show how historical interest again began to reach beyond 
England. Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of 
the Ro7nan E?fipire, completed in 1788, gave a new im- 
pulse and a new model to historical literature, had no 
more sympathy with humanity than Hume, and his irony 
lowers throughout the human value of his history. But 
he had creative power, originality, and the enjoyment and 
imagination of his subject. It was at Rome in 1 764, while 
musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, that the idea of 
writing his book arose in his mind, and his conception 
of the work was that of an artist. Rome, eastern and 
western, was painted in the centre of the world, dying 
slowly Hke a lion in his cave. Around it and towards it he 
drew all the nations and hordes and faiths that wrought 
its ruin ; told their stories from the beginning, and the re- 
sults on themselves and on the world of their victories over 
Rome. This imaginative conception, together with the 
collecting and use of every detail of the arts, literature, 
customs, and manners of the times he described, the read- 
ing and use of all the contemporary literature, the careful 
geographical detail, the marshalling of all this information 
into his narration and towards his conclusion, the power 
with which he moved over this vast arena, and the use of 
a full if too grandiose a style to give importance to his 
subject, makes him the one historian of the eighteenth 
century whom modern research recognises as its master. 
128. Philosophical and Political Literature. — Hutch- 
eson. Hartley, and Reid were inferior as philosophers 
to David Hume, who inquired, while he followed Locke, 



204 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

into the nature of the human understanding, and based 
philosophy upon psychology. He constructed a science 
of man; and finally limited all our knowledge to the 
world of phenomena revealed to us by experience. In 
morals he made utility the only measure of virtue. The 
first of his books, the Treatise of Human Nature, 1739, 
was written in France, and was followed by the Inquij-y 
concernmg the Principles of Morals in 175 1. "Wit Dia- 
logues on Natural Religion were not published till after 
his death. These were his chief philosophical works. 
But in 1 741-2, he had published two volumes oi Essays 
Moral and Political, from which we might infer a politi- 
cal philosophy ; and in 1752 the Political Discourses ap- 
peared, and they have been fairly said to be the cradle 
of political economy. But that subject was afterwards 
taken up by Adam Smith, a friend of Hume's, whose 
book on the Moral Sentiments, 1759, classes him also 
with the philosophers of Scotland. In his Wealth of 
Nations, 1776, by its theory that labour is the source of 
wealth, and that to give the labourer absolute freedom to 
pursue his own interest in his own way is the best means 
of increasing the wealth of the country ; by its proof that 
all laws made to restrain, or to shape, or to promote com- 
merce, were stumbling-blocks in the way of the wealth 
of a state, he created the Science of Political Economy, 
and brought the theory of Free Trade into practice. All 
the questions of labour and capital were now placed on a 
scientific basis, and since that time the literature of the 
whole of the subject has engaged great thinkers. As the 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1 745 TO 1789 205 

immense increase of the industry, wealth, and commerce 
of the country from 1720 to 1770 had thus stirred inquiry 
into the laws which regulate wealth, so now the Metho- 
dist movement, beginning in 1738, awoke an interest in 
the poor, and gave the first impulse to popular education. 
Social Reform became a literary subject, and fills a large 
space until 1832, when political reform brought forward 
new subjects, and the old subjects under new forms. 
This new philanthropy was stirred into further growth 
by the theories of the French Revolution, and these 
theories, taking violent effect in France, roused into 
opposition the genius of Edmund Burke. Unlike Hume, 
whose politics were elaborated in the study, Burke wrote 
his poHtical tracts and speeches face to face with events 
and upon them. Philosophical reasoning and poetic 
passion were wedded together in them on the side of 
Conservatism, and every art of eloquence was used with 
he mastery that imagination gives. In 1766 he defended 
Lord Rockingham's administration ; he was then wrongly 
suspected of the authorship of the Letters of Junius, 
poHtical invectives (1769-72), whose trenchant style has 
preserved them to this day. Burke's Thoughts on the 
Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770, maintained an 
aristocratic government ; and the next year appeared his 
famous Speech on American Taxation, while that on 
American Conciliation, 1774, was answered by his friend 
Johnson in Taxation no Tyranny. The most powerful 
of his works were the Reflections on the French Revo- 
lution, 1 790, the Letter to a Noble Lord, and the Lettei'S 



20t) ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

on a Regicide Peace, 1796-7. The first of these, an- 
swered by Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, and by 
James Mackintosh's Vindicice Gallicce, spread over all 
England a terror of the pruiciples of the Revolution ; the 
third doubled the eagerness of England to carry on the 
war with France. As a writer he needed more temper- 
ance, but, if he had possessed it, we should probably have 
not had his magnificence. As an orator he ended by 
wearying his hearers, but the very men who slept under 
him ir the House read over and over again the same 
speech when published with renewed delight. Gold- 
smith's praise of him — that he " wound himself into 
his subject like a serpent" — gives the reason why he 
sometimes failed as an orator, why he generally suc- 
ceeded as a writer. 

129. Prose from 1789-1832. Miscellaneous. — The 
death of Johnson marks a true period in our later prose 
literature. London had ceased then to be the only literary 
centre. Books were produced in all parts of the country, 
and Edinburgh had its own famous school of literature. 
The doctrines of the French Revolution were eagerly 
supported and eagerly opposed, and stirred like leaven 
through a great part of the literary work of England. 
Later on, through Coleridge, Scott, Carlyle, and others, 
the influence of Lessing, Goethe, of all the new literature 
of Germany, began to tell upon us, in theology, in phi- 
losophy, and even in the novel. The great Enghsh 
Journals, the Morning Chronicle, the Times, the Morning 
Post, the Morning Herald, were all set on foot between 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 20/ 

1775 and 1793, between the war with America and the 
war with France ; and when men Uke Coleridge and 
Canning began to write in them the literature of journal- 
ism was started. A literature especially directed towards 
education arose in the CycIopcEdias,\\\\\(i\\ began in 1778, 
and rapidly developed into vast dictionaries of know- 
ledge. Along with them were the many series issued 
from Edinburgh and 'London oi Popti la r Miscellanies. A 
crowd of literary men found employment in writing about 
books rather than in writing them, and the literature of 
Criticism became a power. The Edinhuj-gh Review was 
established in 1802, and the Quarterly, its political op- 
ponent, in 1809, and these were soon followed by Eraser's 
and Blackwood's Magazine. Jeffrey, Professor Wilson, 
Sydney Smith, and a host of others wrote in these reviews 
on contemporary events and books. Interest in con- 
temporary stimulated interest in past literature, and Cole- 
ridge, Charles Lamb, Thomas Campbell, Hazlitt, Southey, 
and Savage Landor carried on that study of the Eliza- 
bethan and earlier poets to which Warton had given so 
much impulse in the eighteenth century. Literary quar- 
rels concerning the nature of poetry produced books Hke 
Coleridge's Biographia Litera7'ia ; and Wordsworth's 
Essays on his own art are in admirable prose. De 
QuiNCEY, one of the Edinburgh School, is, owing to the 
over-lapping and involved melody of his style, one of our 
best, as he is one of our most various miscellaneous 
writers : and with him for masculine English, for various 
learning and forcible fancy, and, not least, for his vigor- 



208 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

ous lyrical work and poems, we may rank Walter 
Savage Landor, who deepened an interest in English 
and classic literature and made a literature of his own. 
Charles Lamb's inimitable fineness of perception was 
shown in his criticisms on the old dramatists, but his 
most original work was the Essays of Elia, in which he 
renewed the lost grace of the Essay, and with a humour 
not less gentle, more surprising, more self-pleased than 
Addison's. 

130. Theological Literature had received a new im 
pulse in 1738-91 from the evangehsing work of John 
Wesley and Whitfield ; and their spiritual followers, 
Thomas Scott, Newton, and Cecil, made by their writ- 
ings the Evangelical School. William Paley, in his 
Evidences, defended Christianity from the common-sense 
point of view ; while the sermons of Robert Hall and of 
Dr. Chalmers are, in different ways, fine examples of 
devotional and philosophical eloquence. 

131. The eloquent inteUigence of Edinburgh con- 
tinued the Literature of Philosophy in the work of 
Dugald Stewart, Reid's successor, and in that of Dr. 
Browne, who for the most part opposed Hume's funda- 
mental idea that Psychology is a part of the science of 
life. Coleridge brought his own and German philosophy 
into the treatment of theological questions in the Aids to 
Reflection, and into various subjects of life in the Friend. 
The utilitarian view of morals was put forth by Jeremy 
Bentham with great power, but his chief work was in the 
province of law. He founded the philosophy of juris- 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 2O9 

prudence, he invented a scientific legal vocabulary, and we 
owe to him almost every reform that has improved our law. 
He wrote also on political economy, but that subject was 
more fully developed by Malthus, Ricardo, and James Mill. 

132. Biography and travel are Hnked at many points 
(o history, and the literature of the former was enriched 
by Hayley's Cowper, Southey's Life of Nelson, McCrie's 
Life of Knox, Moore's Life of Byron, and Lockhart's 
Life of Scott. As to travel, it has rarely produced books 
^vhich may be called literature, but the works of biog- 
raphers and travellers have brought together the mate- 
rials of literature. Bruce left for Africa in 1762, and in 
the next seventy years Africa, Egypt, Italy, Greece, 
the Holy Land, and the Arctic Regions were made the 
common property of literary men. 

133. The Historical School produced Mitford's Llis- 
tory of Greece and Lingard's History of England ; but 
it was Henry Hallam who for the first time wrote history 
in this country without prejudice. His Europe during 
the Middle Ages, 181 8, is distinguished by its exhaustive 
and judicial summing-up of facts, and his Constitutional 
History of England opened a new vein of history in the 
best way. Since his time, history has become more 
and more worthy of the name of fine literature, and the 
critical schools of our own day, while making truth the 
first thing, and the philosophy of history the second, do 
not disdain but exact the graces of literature. But of all 
the forms of prose literature, the novel was the most 
largely used and developed. 

? 



2IO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

134. The Novel. — The stir of thought made by the 
French Revolution had many side influences on novel- 
writing. The pohtical stories of Thomas Holcroft and 
WiUiam Godwin disclosed a new realm to the novelist. 
The Canterbury Tales of Sophia and Harriet Lee, and 
the wild and picturesque tales of Mrs. Radcliffe intro- 
duced the romantic novel. Mrs. Inchbald's Simple 
Story ^ 1 79 1 5 started the novel of passion, whilst Mrs. 
Opie made domestic life the sphere of her graceful and 
pathetic stories, 1806. Miss Edgeworth in her Irish 
stories gave the first impulse to the novel of national 
character, and in her other tales to the novel with a 
moral purpose, 1800-47. Miss Austen, "with an ex- 
quisite touch which renders commonplace things and 
characters interesting from truth of description and sen- 
timent," produced the best novels we have of everyday 
society, 1811-17. With the peace of 18 15 arose new 
forms of fiction ; and travel, now popular, gave birth to 
the tale of foreign society and manners ; of these, 
Thomas Hope's Anastasius (1819) was the first. The 
classical novel arose in Lockhart's Valerius, and Miss 
Terrier's humorous tales of Scottish life were pleasant 
to Walter Scott. 

It was Walter Scott, however, who raised the whole 
of the literature of the novel into one of the great in- 
fluences that bear on human life. Men are still alive- 
who remember the wonder and dehght with which 
Waverley (1814) was welcomed. The swiftness of work 
combined with vast diligence which belongs to very great 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 21 I 

genius belonged to him. Guy Mannering was written 
in six weeks, and the Bride of Lammermoor, as great in 
fateful pathos as Romeo and Juliet, but more solemn, 
was done in a fortnight. There is then a certain abandon 
in his work which removes it from the dignity of the 
ancient writers, but we are repaid for this loss by the in- 
tensity, and the animated movement, the clear daylight, 
and the inspired dehght in and with which he invented 
and wrote his stories. It is not composition ; it is Scott 
actually present in each of his personages, doing their 
deeds and speaking their thoughts. His national tales 
— and his own country was his best inspiration — are 
written with such love for the characters and the scenes, 
that we feel his living joy and love underneath each of 
the stories as a completing charm, as a spirit that en- 
chants the whole. And in these tales and in his poems 
his own deep kindHness, his sympathy with human 
nature, united, after years of enmity, the Highlands to 
the Lowlands. In the vivid portraiture and dramatic 
reality of such tales as Old Mortality and Quentin Dur- 
ward he created the historical novel. "All is great," 
said Goethe, speaking of one of these historical tales, " in 
the Waverley Novels ; material, effect, characters, execu- 
tion." In truth, so natural is Scott's invention, that it 
seems creation — even the landscape is woven through 
the events and in harmony with them. His comprehen- 
sive power, which drew with the same certainty so many 
characters in so many various classes, was the direct re- 
sult of his profound sympathy with the simpler feelings 



212 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHaP. 

of the human heart, and of his pleasure in writing so 
as to make human life more beautiful and more good in 
the eyes of men. He was always romantic, and his per- 
sonal romance did not fail him when he came to be old. 
Like Shakespeare he kept that to the very close. The 
later years of his Hfe were dark, but the almost unrivalled 
nobleness of his battle against ill fortune proves that he 
was as great-hearted as he was great. " God bless thee, 
Walter, my man," said his uncle, " thou hast risen to be 
great, but thou wast always good." His last long tale of 
power was the Fai?' Maid of Perth, 1828, and his last 
effort, in 1831, was made the year before he died. That 
year, 1832, which saw the deaths of Goethe and Scott, 
is the close of an epoch in Hterature. 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 2l3 



CHAPTER VIII 

POETRY FROM I73O TO 1 83 2 

135. The Elements and Forms of the New Poetry. — 

The poetry we are now to study may be divided into two 
periods. The first dates from about the middle of 
Pope's hfe, and closes with the publication of Cowper's 
Task, 1785 ; the second begins with the Task and closes 
in 1832. The first is not wrongly called a time of transi- 
tion. The influence of the poetry of the past lasted ; 
new elements were added to poetry, and new forms of it 
took shape. There was a change also in the style and 
in the subject of poetry. Under these heads I shall 
bring together the various poetical works of this period. 
(i) The influence of the didactic and satirical poetry 
of the critical school hngered among the new elements 
which first modified and then changed poetry altogether. 
It is found in Johnson's two satires on the manners of 
his time, the London, 1738, and the Vanity of Human 
Wishes, 1 749 ; in Robert Blair's dull poem of The 
Grave, 1 743 ; in Edward Young's Night Thoughts, i 743, 
a poem on the immortahty of the soul, and in his satires 
on The Universal Passion of fame ; in the tame work of 



214 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 

Richard Savage, Johnson's poor friend ; and in the short- 
lived but vigorous satires of Charles Churchill, who died 
in 1764, twenty-one years after Savage. The Pleasures 
of the Imagi7iation, 1744, by Mark Akenside, belongs 
also in spirit to the time of Queen Anne, and was sug- 
gested by Addison's essays in the Spectator on Imagi- 
nation. 

(2) The study of the Greek and Latin classics re- 
vived, and with it a more artistic poetry. Men hke 
Thomas Gray and William Collins attempted to " revive 
the just designs of Greece," not only in fitness of lan- 
guage, but in perfection of form. They are commonly 
placed together, but the genius of each was essentially 
different. What they had in common belonged to the 
age in which they lived, and one of these elements 
was a certain artificial phrasing from which they found it 
difficult to escape. Both sought beauty more than their 
fellows, but Collins found it more than Gray. He had 
the greater grace and the sweeter simplicity, and his Ode 
to Simplicity tells us the direction in which poetry was 
going. His best work, like The Ode to Evening, is near 
to Keats, and recalls that poet's imaginative way. His in- 
ferior work is often rude and his style sometimes obscure, 
but when he is touched by joy in ^'ecstatic trial," or 
when he sits with Melancholy in love of peace and gentle 
musing, he is indeed inspired by truth and loveliness. 
He died too young to do much in a perfect way. Gray 
was different. All is clear light in his work. There is 
no gradual dusky veil such as CoUins threw with so much 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 21 5 

charm over his expression. Out of his love of Greek 
work he drew his fine lucidity. Out of the spirit of his 
own time and from his own cultivated experience he 
drew the moral criticism of human hfe which gives his 
poetry its weight, even its heaviness. It is true the 
moral criticism, even in the Elegy, shares in the com- 
monplace, but it was not so commonplace in his time, 
and it is so full of a gentle charity that it transcends his 
time. He moved with easy power over many forms of 
poetry, but there is naturalness and no rudeness in the 
power. It was adorned by high ornament and finish. 
The Odes are far beyond their age, especially The 
Progress of Poesy, and each kind has its own appropri- 
ate manner. The Elegy will always remain one of the 
beloved poems of Englishmen. It is not only a piece of 
exquisite work ; it is steeped in England. It is contem- 
plative and might have been cold. On the contrary, 
even when it is conventional, it has a certain passion in 
its contemplation which is one of the marks of the work 
of Gray. Had he had more imagination he would have 
been greater, but the spirit of his age repressed nature in 
him. But he stands clear and bright, along with his 
brother, on the ridge between the old and the new. 
Having ascended through the old poetry, he saw the new 
landscape of song below him, felt its fresher air, and sent 
his own power into the men who arose after him. 

(3) The study of the Elizabethan and the earlier 
poets like Chaucer, and of the whole course of poetry in 
England, was taken up with great interest. Shakespeare 



2X6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and Chaucer had engaged both Dryden and Pope ; but 
the whole subject was now enlarged. Gray, like Pope, 
projected a history of English poetry, and his O^e on 
the Progress of Poesy illustrates this new interest. 
Thomas Warton wrote his History of English Poetry, 
1774-81, and brought the lovers of poetry into closer 
contact with Chaucer. Pope's, Theobald's, Sir Thomas 
Hanmer's, and Warburton's editions of Shakespeare were 
succeeded by Johnson's in 1765 ; and Garrick began the 
restoration of the genuine text of Shakespeare's plays 
for the stage. Spenser formed the spirit and work of 
some poets, and Thomas Warton wrote an essay on the 
Faerie Queene. WiUiam Shenstone's Schoohnis tress, 1742, 
was one of these Spenserian poems, and so was Thom- 
son's dehghtful Castle of Indolence, 1748. James Beattie, 
in the Minstrel, 1771, also followed the stanza and man- 
ner of Spenser. 

(4) A new element — interest in the romantic past — 
was aided by the publication of Dr. Percy's Reliques of 
Ancient English Poetiy, 1765. The narrative ballad and 
the narrative romance, afterwards taken up and perfected 
by Sir Walter Scott, had already begun to strike their 
roots afresh in English poetry. The Braes of Yarrow 
and Mallet's William and Ma7garet were written before 
1725. Men now began to seek among the ruder times 
of history for wild, natural stories of human life ; and 
the pleasure in these increased and accompanied the 
growing love of lonely, even of savage scenery. Even 
before the Reliques were published, Gray's power of 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 21/ 

seeing into the right thing is seen in this matter. He 
entered the new paths, and in a new atmosphere, when 
he wrote of the Norse legends, or studied what he could 
learn of the poetry of Wales. The Ossian, 1762, of 
James Macpherson, which imposed itself on the public 
as a translation of Gaelic epic poems, is an example of 
this new element. Still more remarkable in this way 
were the poems of Thomas Chatterton, 

"That sleepless soul who perished in his pride." 

He pretended to have discovered, in a muniment room 
at Bristol, the Death of Sir Charles Bawdin, and other 
poems, by an imaginary monk named Thomas Rowley, 
1768. Written with quaint spelling, and with a great 
deal of lyrical invention, they raised around them a great 
controversy. His early death, at seventeen, has, by the 
pity of it, lifted his lyric poetry, romantic as it is, into 
more repute than it deserves. 

T36. Change of Style. — We have seen how the natural 
style of the Elizabethan poets had passed into a style 
which erred against the simplicity of natural expression. 
In reaction from this the critical poets set aside natural 
feehng, and wrote according to intellectual rules of art. 
Their style lost life and fire; and losing these, lost art 
and gained artifice. Unwarmed by natural feeling, it be- 
came as unnatural a style, though in a different way, 
as that of the later Ehzabethan poets. But out of the 
failure of nature without art, and of art without nature, 



2l8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and cut of the happy union of both in scattered and 
particular examples, the way was now ready for a style 
m which the art should itself be nature, and it found 
Its first absolute expression in a few of Cowper's lyrics. 
His style, in such poems as the Lines to Ma7j Unwin, 
and in The Castaway^ arises out of the simplest pathos, 
and yet is almost as pure in expression as a Greek elegy. 
The work was then done ; but the element of fervent 
passion did not enter into poetry till the poems of Robert 
Burns appeared in 1786. 

137. Change of Subjec^. Nature. — The Poets have 
always worked on two great subjects — -man and nature. 
Up to the age of Pope the subject of man was chiefly 
treated, and we have seen how many phases it went 
through. There remained the subject of nature and of 
man's relation to it ; that is, of the visible landscape, sea, 
and sky, and all that men feel in contact with them. 
Natural scenery had been hitherto chiefly used as a back- 
ground to the picture of human hfe. It now began to 
occupy a much larger space in poetry, and after a time 
grew to occupy a distinct place of its own apart from 
man. Much of this was owing to the opening out of the 
wild country by new roads and to the increased safety of 
travel. It is the growth of this new subject which will 
engage us now. 

138. The Poetry of Natural Description. — We have 
already found in the poets, but chiefly among the lyrical 
poets, a pleasure in rural scenery and the emotions it 
awakened. But nature is only, as in the work of Shake- 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 219 

speare, Marvell, Milton, Vaughan, or Herrick, incident- 
ally introduced. The first poem devoted to natural 
description appeared while Pope was yet alive, in the 
very midst of the town poetry. It was the Seasons, 
1726-30; and it is curious, remembering what I have 
said about the peculiar turn of the Scots for natural de- 
scription, that it was the work of James Thomson, a Scots- 
man. It described the landscape and country Hfe of 
Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. He wrote with 
his eye upon their scenery, and even when he wrote of 
it in his room, it was with "a recollected love." The 
descriptions were too much like catalogues, the very 
fault of the previous Scottish poets, and his style was 
heavy and cold, but he was the first poet who deliber- 
ately led the English people into that separated world of 
natural description which has enchanted us in the work 
of modern poetry. The impulse he gave was soon fol- 
lowed. Men left the town to visit the country and 
record their feelings. John Dyer's Grongar Hill, 1726, 
a description of a journey in South Wales, and his Fleece, 
1757, are full of country sights and scenes: and even 
Akenside mingled his spurious philosophy with pictures 
of the soHtudes of nature. 

Foreign travel now enlarged the love of nature. The 
wilder country of England was eagerly visited. Gray's 
letters, some of the best in the English language, de- 
scribe the landscape of Yorkshire and Westmoreland with 
a minuteness quite new in English literature. In his 
poetry he used the description of nature as " its most 



220 ENGLISH LITERATURE CIIAP 

graceful ornament/' but never made it the subject. It 
was interwoven with reflections on human hfe, and used 
to point its moral. ColHns observes the same method 
in his Ode on the Passions and the Ode to Evening. 
There is as yet but Httle love of nature entirely for its 
own sake. A further step was made by Oliver Gold- 
smith in his Travdler, 1764, a sketch of national man- 
ners and governments, and in his Deserted Village, 1770. 
He describes natural scenery with less emotion than 
ColHns, but does not moralise it like Gray. The scenes 
he paints are pure pictures, and he. has no personal 
interest in them. The next step was made a few years 
later by some fourth-rate men like the two Wartons. 
Their poems do not speak of nature and human life, but 
of nature and themselves. They see the reflection of 
their own passions in the woods and streams, and this 
self-conscious pleasure with lonely nature grew slowly 
into a main subject of poetry. These were the steps 
towards that love of nature for its own sake which we 
shall find in the poets who followed Cowper. One poem 
of the time almost anticipates it. It is the Minstrel, 
1771, of James Beattie. This poem represents a young 
poet educated almost altogether by solitary communion 
with nature, and by love of her beauty ; and both in the 
spirit and treatment of the first part of the story resem- 
bles very closely Wordsworth's description of his own 
education by nature in the beginning of the Prelude. 

139. Further Change of Subject. Man. — During 
this time the interest in maiikind, that is, in man inde- 



VIII rOETRY FROM 1 730 TO 1832 221 

pendent of nation, class, and caste, which we have seen 
in prose, began to influence poetry. One form of it 
appeared in the pleasure the poets began to take in 
men of other nations than England ; another form of it 
— and this was increased by the Methodist revival — was 
a deep feeling for the lives of the poor. Thomson 
speaks with sympathy of the Siberian exile and the 
Mecca pilgrim, and the T7'avelle7^ of Goldsmith enters 
into foreign questions. His Deserted Village, Shenstone's 
Schoolmistress, Gray's Elegy celebrate the annals of the 
poor. Michael Bruce in hxs Lochleven praises the " secret 
primrose path of rural life," and Dr. John Langhorne in 
his Country Justice pleads the cause of the poor and 
paints their sorrows. Connected with this new element 
is the simple ballad of simple love, such as Shenstone's 
Jemmy Dawson, Mickle's Mariner's Wife, Goldsmith's 
Edwin and Angelina, poems which started afresh a de- 
lightful type of poetry, afterwards worked out more com- 
pletely in the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth. In a class 
apart stands the Song to David^ a long poem written by 
Christopher Smart, a friend of Johnson's. Its power of 
metre and imaginative presentation of thoughts and 
things, and its mingling of sweet and grand religious 
poetry ought to make it better known. 

140. Scottish Poetry illustrates and anticipates the 
poetry of the poor and the ballad. We have not men- 
tioned it since Sir David Lyndsay, for with the exception 
of stray songs its voice was almost silent for a century 
and a half. It revived in Allan Ramsay, a friend of 



222 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Pope and Gay. His light pieces of rustic humour were 
followed by the Tea Table Miscella?iy and the Ever- Green, 
collections of existing Scottish songs mixed up with some 
of his own. Ramsay's pastoral drama of the Gentle Shep- 
herd, 1725, is a pure, tender, and genuine picture of 
Scottish life and love among the poor and in the country. 
Robert Ferguson deserves to be named because he 
kindled the muse of Burns, but his occasional pieces, 
1773, are chiefly concerned with the rude and humorous 
Hfe of Edinburgh. One man, Michael Bruce, illustrates 
the Enghsh transition of which I have spoken. The 
Ballad, Scotland's dear companion, took a more modern 
but pathetic form in some Yarrow poems, in Atild Robin 
Gray and the Lament for Flodden. The peculiarities I 
have dwelt on already continue in this Scottish revival. 
There is the same nationality, the same rough wit, the 
same love of nature, but the love of colour has lessened. 
141. The Second Period of the New Poetry. — The 
new elements and the changes on which I have dwelt 
are expressed by three poets — Cowper, Crabbe, and 
Burns. But before these we must mention the poems 
of William Blake, the artist, and for three reasons, (i) 
They represent the new elements. The Poetical Sketches, 
written in 1777, illustrate the new study of the Eliza- 
bethan poets. Blake imitated Spenser, and in his short 
fragment of Edwa7'd III. we hear again the note of 
Marlowe's violent imagination. A short poem To the 
Muses is a cry for the restoration to English poetry of 
the old poetic passion it had lost. In some ballad poems 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO I832 223 

we trace the influence represented by Ossia7i and quicks 
ened by the pubUcation of Percy's Reliques. (2) We 
find also in his work certain elements which belong to 
the second period of which I shall soon speak. The 
love of animals is one. A great love of children and 
the poetry of home is another. He also anticipated in 
1789 and 1794, when his Songs of Innocence and Experi- 
ence were written, the simple natural poetry of ordinary 
life which Wordsworth perfected in the Lyrical Ballads, 
1798. Moreover, the democratic element, the hatred of 
priestcraft, and the cry against social wrongs which came 
much later into English poetry spring up in his poetry. 
Then, he was a full Mystic, and through his mysticism 
appears that search after the true aims of life and after a 
freer theology which characterise our poetry after 1832. 
(3) He cast back as well as forward, and reproduced in 
his songs the spirit, movement, and music of the Ehza- 
bethan songs. The little poems in the Songs of Inno- 
cence, on infancy and first motherhood, and on subjects 
like the Lamb, are without rival in our language for sim- 
pHcity, tenderness, and joy. The Songs of Experience 
give the reverse side of the Songs of Innocence, and they 
see the evil of the world as a child with a man's heart 
would see it — with exaggerated horror. This small but 
predictive work of Blake, coming where it did, between 
1777 and 1794, going back to Elizabethan lyrics and for- 
ward to those of Wordsworth, is very remarkable. 

142. William Cowper's first poems were some of the 
Olney Hymns, 1 7 79, and in these the religious poetry of 



224 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA* 

Charles Wesley was continued. The profound personal 
religion, gloomy even to insanity as it often became, 
which fills the whole of Cowper's poetry, introduced a 
theological element into English poetry which continually 
increased till it died out with Browning and Tennyson. 
His didactic and satirical poems in 1782 hnk him back- 
wards to the last age. His translation of Homer, 1791, 
and of shorter pieces from the Latin and Greek, connects 
him with the classical influence, his interest in Milton 
with the revived study of the English poets. The play- 
ful and gentle vein of humour which he showed in John 
Gilpin and other poems, opened a new kind of verse to 
poets. With this kind of humour is connected a simple 
pathos of which Cowper is a great master. The Lines to 
Ma?y Unwin and to his Mother's Picture prove, with 
the work of Blake, that pure natural feeling wholly free 
from artifice had returned to English song. A new ele- 
ment was also introduced by him and Blake — the love 
of animals and the poetry of their relation to man, a vein 
plentifully worked by after poets. His greatest work was 
the Task, 1785. It is mainly a description of himself 
and a life in the country, his home, his friends, his 
thoughts as he walked, the quiet landscape of Olney, the 
life of the poor people about him, mixed up with disqui- 
sitions on pohtical and social subjects, and at the end, a 
prophecy of the victory of the Kingdom of God. The 
change in it in relation to the subject of nature is very 
great. Cowper loves nature entirely for her own sake. 
The change in relation to the subject of man is equally 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 22$ 

great. The idea of mankind as a whole which we have 
seen growing up is fully formed in Cowper's mind. And 
though splendour and passion were added by the poets 
who succeeded him to the new poetry, yet they worked 
on the thoughts he had begun to express, and he is so 
far their forerunner. 

143. George Crabbe took up the side of the poetry of 
man which had to do with the lives of the poor in the 
Village, 1783, and in the Parish Register, 1807. In the 
short tales related in these books we are brought face to 
face with the sacrifices, temptations, love, and crimes of 
humble life, and the effect of these poems in widening 
human sympathies was great among his readers. His 
work wanted the humour of Cowper, and though often 
pathetic and always forcible, was perhaps too unrelenting 
for pure pathos. He did much better work afterwards 
in his Tales of the Hall. His work on nature is as mi- 
nute and accurate, but as hmited in range of excellence, 
as his work on man. Robert Bloomfield, himself a 
poor shoemaker, added to this poetry of the poor. The 
Farmer's Boy, finished in 1798, and the Rural Tales, 
are poems as cheerful as Crabbe's were stern, and his 
descriptions of rural hfe are not less faithful. The poetry 
of the poor, thus started, long continued in our verse. 
Wordsworth added to it new features, and Thomas Hood 
in short pieces like the Song of the Shirt gave it a direct 
bearing on social evils. 

144. One element, the passionate treatment of love, 
had been on the whole absent from our poetry since the 

Q 



226 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Restoration. It was restored by Robert Burns. In his 
love songs we hear again, even more simply, more directly, 
the same natural music which in the age of Elizabeth en- 
chanted the world. It was as a love-poet that he began 
to write, and the first edition of his poems appeared in 
1786. But he was not only the poet of love, but also of 
the new excitement about mankind. Himself poor, he 
sang the poor. He did the same work in Scotland in 
1786 which Crabbe began in England in 1783 and Cow- 
per in 1785, and it is worth remarking how the dates run 
together. As in Cowper, so also in Burns, the further 
widening of human sympathies is shown in his tenderness 
for animals. He carried on also the Celtic elements of 
Scottish poetry, but the rattling fun of the Jolly Beggars 
and of Tarn o' Shanter is united to a life-like painting ot 
human character which is peculiarly English. A large 
gentleness of feeling often made his wit into that true 
humour which is more English than Celtic, and the pas- 
sionate pathos of such poems as Mary in Heaven is con- 
nected with this vein of EngHsh humour. The special 
nationality of Scottish poetry is as strong in Burns as in 
any of his predecessors, but it is also mingled with a 
larger view of man than the merely national one. Nor 
did he fail to carry on the Scottish love of nature, though 
he shows the Enghsh influence in using natural descrip- 
tion not for the love of nature alone, but as a background 
for human love. It was the strength of his passions and 
the weakness of his moral will which made his poetry 
^nd spoilt his life. 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 22; 

145. The French Revolution and the Poets. — Certain 
ideas relating to mankind considered as a whole had 
been growing up in Europe for some centuries, and we 
have seen their influence on the work of Covvper, Crabbe, 
and Burns. These ideas spoke of a return to nature, and 
of the best life being found in the country rather than 
in the town, so that the simple life of the poor and the 
scenery of the country were idealised into subjects for 
poetry. They spoke also of natural rights that belonged 
to every man, and which united all men to one another. 
All men were equal, and free, and brothers. There was 
therefore only one class, the class of man ; only one 
nation, the nation of man, of which all were citizens. 
The divisions therefore which wealth and rank and 
caste and national boundaries had made were theo- 
retically put aside as wrong. Such ideas had been 
growing into the political, moral, and religious life of 
men ever since the Renaissance, and they brought with 
them their own emotions. France, which does much of 
the formative work of Europe, had for some time past 
expressed them constantly in her literature. She now 
expressed them in the action which overthrew the Bastille 
in 1789 and proclaimed the new Constitution in the fol- 
lowing year. They passed then from an abstract to a 
concrete form, and became active powers in the world, 
and it is round the excitement they kindled in England 
that the work of the poets from 1790 to 1832 can best 
be grouped. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey ac- 
cepted them at first with joy, but receded from them 



228 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

when they ended in the violence of the Reign of Terror, 
and in the imperiahsm of Napoleon. Scott turned from 
them with pain to write of tlie romantic past which they 
destroyed. Byron did not express them themseh^es, but 
he expressed the whole of the revolutionary spirit in its 
action against old social opinions. Shelley took them up 
after the reaction against them had begun to die away, 
and in half his poetry re- expressed them. Two men, 
Rogers and Keats, were wholly untouched by them. 
One special thing they did for poetry. They brought 
back, by the powerful feelings they kindled in men, 
passion into its style, into all its work about man, and 
through that, into its work about nature. 

But, in giving the French Revolution its due weight, 
we must always remember that these ideas existed al- 
ready in England and were expressed by the poets. The 
French outburst precipitated them, and started our new 
poetry with a rush and a surprise. But the enthusiasm 
soon suffered a chill, and a great part of our new poetry 
was impelled, not by the Revolution, but by the indig- 
nant revolt against what followed on it. Moreover, I 
have already shown that fully half of the new lines of 
thought and feeling on which the poetry of England 
ran in the nineteenth century had been laid down in 
the century which preceded it, and they were com- 
pleted now. 

146. Robert Southey began his political hfe with the 
revolutionary poem of Wat Tyler, 1794; and between 
1801 and 1 8 14 wrote Thalaba, Madoc, The Curse oj 



Vm POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 229 

Kehania, and Roderick the Last of the Goths. Thalaha 
and Kehama are stories of Arabian and of Indian mythol- 
ogy. They are real poems, and have the interest of 
good narrative and the charm of musical metre, but 
the finer spirit of poetry is not in them. Roderick is 
the most human and the most poetical. His Vision oj 
Judgment, written on the death of George III., and ridi- 
culed by Byron in another Vision, proves him to have^ 
become a Tory of Tories. Samuel T. Coleridge could 
not turn round so completely, but the stormy enthusiasm 
of his early poems was lessened when in 1796 he wrote 
the Ode on She Departing Year and France, an Ode, 
1798. His early poems are transitional, partly based 
on Gray, violent and obscure in style. But when he 
came to live with Wordsworth, he gained simplicity, 
and for a short time his poetic spirit was at the height 
of joy and production. But his early disappointment 
about France was bitter, and then, too, he injured his 
own life. The noble ode to Dejection is instinct not 
only with his own wasted life, but with the sorrow of 
one who has had golden ideals and found them turn 
in his hands to clay. His best work is but httle, but 
unique of its kind. For exquisite metrical movement 
and for imaginative phantasy, there is nothing in our 
language to be compared with Christahel and Knbla 
Khan. The Ancient Mariner, published as one of the 
Lyi'ical Ballads in 1798, belongs to the dim country 
between earth and heaven, where the fairy music is 
heard, sometimes dreadful, sometimes lovely, but always 



230 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 

lonely. All that he did excellently might be bound up 
in twenty pages, but it should be bound in pure gold. 

147. Of all the poets misnamed Lake Poets, William 
Wordsworth was the greatest. Born in 1770, educated 
on the banks of Esthwaite, he loved the scenery of the 
Lakes as a boy, lived among it in his manhood, and 
died in 1850 at Rydal Mount, close to Rydal Lake. 
He took his degree in 1791 at Cambridge. The year 
before, he had made a short tour on the Continent, 
and stepped on the French shore at the very time 
when the whole land was "mad with joy." The end 
of 1 791 saw him again in France and Hving at Orleans. 
He threw himself eagerly into the Revolution, joined 
the "patriot side," and came to Paris just after the 
September massacre of 1792. Narrowly escaping the 
fate of his friends the Brissotins, he got home to Eng- 
land before the execution of Louis XVL in 1793, and 
published his Descriptive Sketches and the Evening 
Walk, His sympathy with the French continued, and 
he took their side against his own country. He was 
poor, but his friend Raisley Calvert left him 900/. and 
enabled him to hve the simple Hfe he had then chosen 
— the hfe of a retired poet. At first we find him at 
Racedown, where in 1797 he made friendship with 
Coleridge, and then at Alfoxden, in Somerset, where 
he and Coleridge planned and published in 1798 the 
first volume of the Lyrical Ballads. After a winter in 
Germany with Coleridge, where the Prelude was be- 
gun, he took a small cottage at Grasmere, and the 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 23 1 

first book of The Recluse tells of his settlement in that 
quiet valley. It tells also of the passion and intensity 
of the young man who saw infinite visions of work 
before him, and who lived poor, in daily and unbroken 
joy. It was in this irradiated world that he wrote the 
best of his poems. There in 1805-6 he finished the 
Prelude. Another set of the Lyrical Ballads appeared 
in 1800, and in 1807 other poems. The Excursion 
belongs to 18 14. From that time till his death he 
produced from his home at Rydal Mount a long suc- 
cession of poems. 

148. Wordsworth and Nature. — The Prelude is the 
history of Wordsworth's poetical growth from a child 
till 1806. It reveals him as the poet of Nature and 
of Man. His view of nature was entirely different from 
that which up to his time the poets had held. Words- 
worth conceived, as poet, that nature was alive. It had, 
he imagined, one living soul which, entering into flower, 
stream, or mountain, gave them each a soul of their 
own. Between this Spirit in nature and the mind of 
man there was a prearranged harmony which enabled 
nature to communicate its own thoughts to man, and 
man to reflect upon them, until an absolute union be- 
tween them was estabUshed. This was, in fact, the 
theory of the Florentine Neo-Platonists of the Renais- 
sance. They did not care for nature, but when Words- 
worth either reconceived or adopted this idea, it made 
him the first who loved nature with a personal love, 
for she, being living, and personal, and not only his 



232 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

reflection, was made capable of being loved as a man 
loves a woman. He could brood on her character, her 
ways, her words, her life, as he did on those of his 
wife or sister. Hence arose his minute and loving ob- 
servation of her and his passionate description of all 
her life. This was his poetic philosophy with regard 
to nature, and bound up as it was with the idea of 
God as the Thought which pervaded and made the 
world, it rose into a poetic religion of nature and man. 
149. Wordsworth and Man. — The poet of nature in 
this special way, Wordsworth is even more the poet of 
man. It is by his close and loving penetration into 
the realities and simplicities of human life that he him- 
self makes his claim on our reverence as a poet. He 
relates in the Prelude how he had been led through his 
love of nature to honour man. The shepherds of the 
Lake hills, the dalesmen, had been seen by him as 
part of the wild scenery in which he lived, and he 
mixed up their Hfe with the grandeur of nature and 
came to honour them as part of her being. The love 
of nature led him to the love of man. It was exactly 
the reverse order to that of the previous poets. At 
Cambridge, and afterwards, in the crowd of London 
and in his first tour on the Continent, he received new 
impressions of the vast world of man, but nature still 
remained the first. It was only during his life in France 
and in the excitement of the new theories and their ac- 
tivity that he was swept away from nature and found 
himself thinking of man as distinct from her and first 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 233 

in importance. But the hopes he had formed from the 
Revolution broke down. All his dreams about a new 
life for mankind were made vile when France gave up 
hberty for Napoleon; and he was left without love of 
nature or care for man. It was then that his sister 
Dorothy, herself worthy of mention in a history of litera- 
ture, led him back to his early love of nature and restored 
his mind. Living quietly at Grasmere, he sought in the 
simple lives of the dalesmen round him for the founda- 
tions of what he felt to be a truer view of mankind than 
the theories of the French Revolution afforded. And 
in thinking and writing of the common duties and faith, 
kindnesses and truth of lowly men, he found in man once 
more 

an object of delight, 
Of pure imagination and of love. 

With that he recovered his interest in the larger move- 
ments of mankind. His love of liberty and hatred of 
oppression revived. He saw in Napoleon the enemy of 
the human race. A series of sonnets followed the events 
on the Continent. One recorded his horror at the attack 
on the Swiss, another mourned the fate of Venice, an- 
other the fate of Toussaint the negro chief; others cele- 
brated the struggle of Hofer and the Tyrolese, others 
the struggle of Spain. Two thanksgiving odes rejoiced in 
the overthrow of the oppressor at Waterloo. He became 
conservative in his old age, but his interest in social 
and national movements did not decay. He wrote, and 



234 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

badly, on Education, the Poor Laws, and other sub- 
jects. When almost seventy he took the side of the 
Carbonari and sympathised with the Italian struggle. 
He was truly a poet of mankind. But his chief work 
was done in his own country and among his own folk ; 
and he is the foremost singer of those who threw around 
the lives of homely men and women the glory and sweet- 
ness of song. He made his verse " deal boldly with sub- 
stantial things " ; his theme was '' no other than the very 
heart of man " ; and his work has become what he de- 
sired it to be, a force to soothe and heal the weary soul 
of the world, a power like one of nature's, to strengthen 
or awaken the imagination in mankind. He lies asleep 
now among the people he loved, in the green churchyard 
of Grasmere, by the side of the stream of Rothay, in a 
place as quiet as hi;. Hfe. Few spots on earth are more 
sacred than his grave. 

150. Sir Walter Scott was Wordsworth's dear friend, 
and his career as a poet began with the Lay of the Last 
Minstrel, 1805. But before that he had collected, 
inspired by his revolt Irom the Revolution to the re- 
gretted past, the song and ballads of the Border. 
Marmion was pubHshed in 1808, and the Lady of the 
Lake in 18 10. These were his best poems ; the others, 
with the exception of some lyrics which touch the sad- 
ness and exultation of life with equal power, do not 
count in our estimate of him. He brought the narrative 
poem into a new and delightfal excellence. In Mar- 
mion and the Lady of the Lake his wonderful inventiveness 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 235 

n story and character is at its height, and it is matched 
by the vividness of his natural description. No poet, 
and in this he carries on the old Scottish quality, is a 
finer colourist. Nearly all his natural description is of 
the wild scenery ot the Highlands and the Lowland 
moorland. He touched it with a pencil so light, grace- 
ful, and true, that the very names are made forever 
romantic ; while his faithful love for the places he de- 
scribes fills his poetry with the finer spirit of his own 
tender humanity. 

151. Scotland produced another poet in Thomas 
Campbell. His earliest poem, the Pleasures of Hope, 
1799, belonged in its formal rhythm and rhetoric, and 
in its artificial feeling for nature, to the time of Thomson 
and Gray rather than to the newer time. He will chiefly 
live by his lyrics. Hohenlinden, the Battle of the Baltic^ 
the Mariners of England, are splendid specimens of the 
war poetry of England ; and the Song to the Evening Star 
and Lord Ullin's Daughter, full of tender feeling, mark 
the influence of the more natural style that Wordsworth 
had brought to excellence. 

152. Rogers and Moore. — The Pleasures of Memory, 
1792, and the Italy, 1822, of Samuel Rogers, are the 
work of a slow and cultivated mind, and contain some 
iaboured but fine descriptions. The curious thing is that, 
living apart in a courtly region of culture, there is not a 
trace in all his work that Europe and England and 
society had passed during his life through a convulsion 
of change. To that convulsion the best poems of Thoimas 



236 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAV 

Moore may be referred. They are the songs he wrote 
to the Irish airs collected in 1796. The best of them 
have for their hidden subject the struggle of Ireland 
against England. Many of them have lyrical beauty and 
soft melody. At times they reach true pathos, but their 
lightly lifted gaiety is also delightful. He sang them 
himself in society, and it is not too much to say that they 
helped by the interest they stirred to further Catholic 
Emancipation. 

153. We turn to very different types of men when we 
come to Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Of the three. Lord 
Byron had most of the quality we call force. Born in 
1788, his Hours of Idleness, a collection of short poems, 
in 1807, was mercilessly lashed in the Edinburgh Review. 
The attack only served to awaken his genius, and he 
replied with astonishing vigour in the satire of English 
Bards and Scotch Reviewers in 1809. Eastern travel 
gave birth to the first two cantos of Childe Harold, 181 2, 
to the Giaour and the Bride of Abydos in 18 13, to the 
Corsair "dLXiA Lara in 18 14. The Siege of Corinth, Par- 
isina, the Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, and Childe 
Harold were finished before 1819. In 18 18 he began 
a new style in Beppo, which he developed fully in the 
successive issues of Don Juan, 1819-24. During this 
time he published a number of dramas, partly historical, 
as his Marino Ealiero, partly imaginative, as the Cain. 
His life had been wild and useless, but he died in trying 
to redeem it for the sake of the freedom of Greece. At 
Missolonghi he was seized with fever, and passed away 
in April, 1824. 



vm POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 237 

154. The Position of Byron as a Poet is a curious one. 
He is partly of the past and partly of the present. Some- 
thing of the school of Pope clings to him ; yet no one so 
completely broke away from old measures and old man- 
ners to make his poetry individual, not imitative. At 
first, he has no interest whatever in the human questions 
which were so strongly felt by Wordsworth and Shelley. 
His early work is chiefly narrative poetry, written that 
he might talk of himself and not of mankind. Nor has 
he any philosophy except that which centres round the 
problem of his own being. Cain, the most thoughtful 
of his productions, is in reality nothing more than the 
representation of the way in which the doctrines of 
original sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. 
We feel naturally great interest in this strong personaHty, 
put before us with such obstinate power, but it wearies 
us at last. Finally it wearied himself. As he grew in 
power, he escaped from his morbid self, and ran into 
the opposite extreme in Don Juan. It is chiefly in it 
that he shows the influence of the revolutionary spirit. 
It is written in bold revolt against all the conventionality 
of social morality and rehgion and politics. It claimed 
for himself and for others absolute freedom of individual 
act and thought in opposition to that force of society 
which tends to make all men after one pattern. This 
was the best result of his work, though the w^ay in which 
it was done can scarcely be approved. As the poet of 
nature he belongs also to the old and the new school. 
Byron's sympathy with nature is a sympathy with himself 



238 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

reflected in her moods. But he also escapes from this 
position of the later eighteenth century poets, and looks 
on nature as she is, apart from himself; and this escape 
is made, as in the case of his poetry of man, in his later 
poems. Lastly, it is his colossal power and the ease that 
comes from it, in which he resembles Dryden, as well as 
his amazing productiveness, which mark him specially. 
But it is always more power of the intellect than of the 
imagination. 

155. In Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the contrary, the 
imagination is first and the intellect second. He pro- 
duced while yet a boy some worthless tales, but soon 
showed in Queen Mab, 1813, the influence of the revolu- 
tionary era, combined in him with a violent attack on the 
existing forms of religion. One half of Shelley's poetry, 
and of his heart, was devoted to help the world towards 
khe golden year he prophesied in Queen Mab, and to 
denounce and overthrow all that stood in its way. The 
other half was personal, an outpouring of himself in his 
seeking after the perfect ideal he could not find, and, 
sadder still, could not even conceive. Queen Mab is an 
example of the first, Alastor of the second. The hopes 
for man with which Queen Mab was written grew cold, 
and he turned from writing about mankind to describe 
in Alastor the hfe and wandering and death of a lonely 
poet. But the Alastor who isolated the poet from man- 
kind was, in Shelley's own thought, a spirit of evil, and 
his next poem, the Revolt of Isla??i, 181 7, unites him 
again to the interests of humanity. He wrote it with the 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 239 

hope that men were beginning to recover from the apathy 
and despair into which the failure of the revolutionary 
ideas had thrown them, and to show them what they 
should strive and hope for, and destroy. The poem 
itself has finer passages in it than Alas tor, but as a whole 
it is inferior to it. It is far too formless. The same year 
Shelley went to Italy, and never returned to England. 
He then produced Rosalind and Helen dJCi^ Julian and 
Maddalo ; but the new health and joy he now gained 
brought back his enthusiasm for mankind, and he broke 
out into the splendid lyric drama of Prometheus Unbound. 
Asia, at the beginning of the drama separated from Pro- 
metheus, is the all-pervading Love which in loving makes 
the universe of nature. When Prometheus is united to 
Asia, the spirit of Love in man is wedded to the spirit of 
Love in nature, and all the world of man and nature is 
redeemed. The marriage of these two, and the distinct 
existence of each for that purpose, is the same idea as 
Wordsworth's differently expressed ; and Shelley and he 
are the only two poets who have touched it philosophi- 
cally, Wordsworth with most contemplation, Shelley with 
most imagination. Prometheus Unbound is the finest 
example we have of the working out in poetry of the idea 
of a regenerated universe, and the fourth act is the 
choral song of its emancipation. Then, Shsl'ey, having 
expressed this idea with exultant imagination^ turned to 
try his matured power upon other subjects^. Two of 
these were neither personal nor for the sake of man. 
The first, the drama of the Cenci^ is as restrained in 



240 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

expression as the previous poem is exuberant : yet there 
is no poem of Shelley's in which passion and thought 
and imagery are so wrought together. The second was 
the Ado?iais, a lament for the death of John Keats. It 
is a poem written by one who seems a spirit about a 
spirit, and belongs in expression, thought, and feeling to 
that world above the senses in which Shelley habitually 
lived. Of all this class of poems, to which many of his 
lyrics belong, Epipsychidion is the most impalpable, but, 
to those who care for Shelley's ethereal world, the finest 
poem he wrote. Of the same class is the IVitch of Atlas, 
the poem in which he has personified divine Imagination 
in her work in poetry^ and imaged all her attendants, and 
her doings among men. 

As a lyric poet, Shelley, on his own ground, is easily 
great. Some of the lyrics are purely personal ; some, as 
in the very finest, the Ode to the West Wind, mingle 
together personal feeling and prophetic hope for man- 
kind. Some are lyrics of pure nature ; some are dedi- 
cated to the rebuke of tyranny and the cause of liberty ; 
others belong to the indefinite passion he called love, 
and others are written on visions of those "■ shapes that 
haunt Thought's wildernesses." They form together the 
most sensitive, the most imaginative, and the most musi- 
cal, but the least tangible lyrical poetry we possess. 

As the poet of nature, he had the same idea as Words- 
worth, that nature was alive : but while Wordsworth 
made the active principle which filled and made nature 
to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. The natural 



/Ill POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 24I 

world was dear then to his soul as well as to his eye. 
but he loved best its indefinite aspects. He wants the 
closeness of grasp of nature which Wordsworth and Keats 
had, but he had the power in a far greater degree than 
they of describing the cloud-scenery of the sky, the 
doings of the great sea, and vast realms of landscape. 
He is in this, as well as in his eye for subtle colour, the 
Turner of poetry. What he might have been we cannot 
tell, for at the age of thirty he left us, drowned in the sea 
he loved, washed up and burned on the sandy spits near 
Pisa. His ashes lie beneath the walls of Rome, and Cor 
cordium, '' Heart of hearts," written on his tomb, well 
says what all who love poetry feel when they think of 
him. 

156. John Keats lies near him, cut off like him before 
his genius ripened ; not so ideal, but for that very reason 
more naturally at home with nature than Shelley. In 
one thing he was entirely different from Shelley — he had 
no care whatever for the great human questions which 
stirred Shelley ; the present was entirely without interest 
to him. He marks the close of that poetic movement 
which the ideas of the Revolution had crystallised in 
England, as Shelley marks the attempt to revive it. 
Keats, seeing nothing to move him in an age which had 
now sunk into apathy on these points, went back to 
Spenser, and especially to Shakespeare's minor poems, 
to find his inspiration ; to Greek and mediaeval life to 
find his subjects, and established, in doing so, that which 
has been called the litei-ary poetry of England. Leigh 



242 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Hunt, his friend and Shelley's, did part of this work. 
The first subject on which Keats worked, after some 
minor poems in 181 7, was Endymion, 18 18, his last, 
Hyperion, 1820. These^ along with Lamia, which is, on 
the whole, the finest of his longer poems, were poems of 
Greek life. Endymion has all the faults and all the 
promise of a great poet's early work, and no one knew 
its faults better than Keats, whose preface is a model of 
just self-judgment. Hyperion, a fragment of a tale of the 
overthrow of the Titans, is itself like a Titanic torso. Its 
rhythm was derived from Milton, but its poetry is wholly 
his own. But the mind of Keats was as yet too luxuriant 
to support the greatness of his subject's argument, and 
the poem dies away. It is beautiful, even in death. 
Both poems are filled with that which was deepest in the 
mind of Keats, the love of loveliness for its own sake, 
the sense of its rightful and pre-eminent power; and in 
the singleness of worship which he gave to Beauty, Keats 
is especially the ideal poet. Then he took us back into 
mediaeval romance, and in this also he started a new 
type of poetry. There are two poems which mark this 
revival — Isabella, and the Eve of St. Agnes. Mediaeval 
in subject, they are modern in manner ; but they are, 
above all, of the poet himself. Their magic is all his 
own. In smaller poems, such as the Ode on a Grecian 
Urn, the poem To Autumn, to the Nightingale, and 
some sonnets, he is the fairest of all Apollo's children. 
He knew the inner soul of words. He felt the world 
where ideas and their forms are one, where nature and 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 243 

humanity, before they divide, flow from a single source. 
In all his poems, his painting of nature is as close as 
Wordsworth's, but more ideal ; less full of the imagina- 
tion that links human thought to nature, but more full of 
the imagination which broods upon enjoyment of beauty. 
He was not much interested in human questions, but as 
his mind grew, humanity made a more and more impera- 
tive call upon him. Had he lived, his poetry would have 
dealt more closely with the heart of man. His letters, 
some of the most original in the English language, show 
this clearly. The second draft of Hyperion, unpublished 
in his lifetime, and inferior as poetry to the first, accuses 
himself of apartness from mankind, and expresses his 
resolve to write of Man, the greatest subject of all. 
Whether he could have done this well remains unknown. 
His career was short ; he had scarcely begun to write 
when death took him away from the loveliness he loved 
so keenly. Consumption drove him to Rome, and there 
he died, save for one friend, alone. He lies not far 
from Shelley, on the " slope of green access," near the 
pyramid of Caius Cestius. He sleeps apart ; he is him- 
self a world apart. 

157. Modern English Poetry. — Keats marks the ex- 
haustion of the impulse which began with Burns and 
Cowper. There was no longer now in England any 
large wave of public thought or feeling such as could 
awaken the national emotion and life out of which poetry 
is naturally born. We have then, arising after the deaths 
of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, a number of pretty litde 



244 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

poems, having no inward fire, no idea, no marked char- 
acter. They might be written by any versifier at any 
time, and express pleasant, indifferent thought in pleas- 
ant verse. Such were Mrs. Hemans' poems, and those 
of L. E. L., and such were Tennyson's earHest poems, in 
1830. There were, however, a few men who, close to 
1820 and 1822, had drunk at the fountain of Shelley, and 
who, for a very brief time, continued, amid the apathy, 
to write with some imagination and fervour. T. L. Bed- 
does, whose only valuable work was done between 1822 
and 1825, was one of these. George Darley, whose Sylvia 
earned the praise of Coleridge, was another. They rep- 
resent in their imitation of Shelley, in their untutored 
imagination, the last struggles of the poetic phase which 
closed with the death of Byron. When Browning imitated 
or rather loved Shelley in his first poem, Pauline, it was 
to bid Shelley farewell ; when Tennyson imitated Byron 
and was haunted by Keats in his first poems, it was also 
to bid them both farewell. Then Tennyson and Browning 
passed on to strike unexpected waters out of the rocks 
and to pour two rivers of fresh poetry over the world. 
For with the Reform agitation, and the twofold religious 
movement at Oxford, which was of the same date, a 
novel national excitement came on England, and with 
it the new tribe of poets arose among whom we have 
lived. The elements of their poetry were also new, 
though we can trace their beginnings in the previous 
poetry. This poetry took up, so far as Art could touch 
them, the theological, social, and even the political ques- 



VIII POETRY FROM I73O TO 1832 245 

tions which disturbed England. It came, before long^ 
moved by the critical and scientific inquiries into the 
origins of religion and man and the physical world, to 
represent the scepticism of England and the struggle 
for faith against doubt. It gave itself t metaphysics, 
but chiefly under the expression and analysis of the 
characters of men and women. It played with a vast 
variety of subjects, and treated them all with a personal 
passion which filled them with emotion. It worked 
out, from the point of view of deep feeling, the relation 
of man to God, and of man to sorrow and immor- 
tality. It studied and brought to great excellence the 
Idyll, the Song, and the short poem on classic subjects 
with a reference to modern life. It increased, to an 
amazing extent, the lyrical poetry of England. The 
short lyric was never written in such numbers and of 
such excellence since the days of Elizabeth. It recapt- 
ured and clothed in a new dress the Arthurian tale, and 
Hnked us, back through many poets, to the days of 
legend and delight. It re-estabhshed for us in this new 
time, as the most natural and most emotional subject of 
English poetry, England, her history, her people, and 
her landscape, so that the new poets have described not 
only the whole land but the natural scenery and histori- 
cal story, the human and animal life of the separate 
counties. Our native land, as in the days of Elizabeth, 
has been idealised. 

Nor did this new impulse stay in England only. It 
went abroad for its subjects, and especially to Italy. It 



246 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Strove to express the main characteristics of periods of 
history and of art, of the origins of rehgions and of Chris- 
tianity, of classic and Renaissance thought at critical 
times, and of lyric passion in modern hfe. Indeed, it 
aimed at a universal representation of human life and 
at a subtle characterisation of individual temperaments. 
Thus, it was a poetry of England, and also of the larger 
world beyond England. 

Apart from the main stream of poetry, there were 
separate streams which represented distinct passages in 
the general movement. The Son 7ie^s of ChRvles Tenny- 
son Turner, which began in 1830, stand by their grace 
and tenderness at the head of a large production of 
poetry which describes with him the shy, sequestered, 
observant life of the English scholar and lover of nature, 
of country piety and country people. One man among 
them stands alone, William Barnes, of Dorsetshire. The 
time will come when the dialect in which he wrote will 
cease to prevent the lovers of poetry from appreciating 
at its full worth a poetry which, written in the mother- 
tongue of the poor and of his own heart, is as close to 
the lives and souls of simple folk as it is to the woods 
and streams, the skies and farms of rustic England. 
Among them also is Coventry Patmore, who, though 
alive, belongs to the past. What Barnes did for the 
peasant and the farmer, Patmore did for the cultivated 
life which in quiet English counties gathers round the 
church, the parsonage, and the hall, the lives and piety 
of the EngHsh homes that are still the haunts of ancient 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 247 

peace. His work, with its retired and careful if over- 
delicate note, is a true picture of a small part of English 
life. But it has the faults of its excellences. 

The High Church and Broad Church movements, as 
they were called, produced two sets of poetical writers who 
also stand somewhat apart from the main line of English 
poetry. The first is best represented by John Keble, 
whose Christian Yea?% in 1827, with its poetry, so good 
within its own range, so weak beyond it, was the source 
of many books of poems of a similar but inferior char- 
acter. On the other hand the impulse towards a wider 
theology was combined in some poets with a laxer moral- 
ity than England is accustomed to maintain, and Bailey's 
Festus, 1839, was the first of a number of sensational 
poems which painted the struggles of the spirit towards 
immortal life, and of the senses towards mortal love with 
equal effervescence. A noble translation of Omar 
Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald, and the fine ballad-songs 
and Andro7neda of Charles Kingsley, may also be said to 
flow apart from the main stream in which poetry flowed. 

Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning (whose wife 
will justly share his fame) began to write between 1830 
and 1833, and continued their work side by side for fifty 
years, when they died, almost together. Both of them 
were wholly original, and both of them, differing at every 
point of their art, kept with extraordinary vitality their 
main powers, and were capable of fresh invention, even 
to the very last. They passed through a long period of 
change and development, during which all the existing 



248 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

foundations of faith and knowledge and art were dug out, 
investigated, tested, and an attempt made to reconstruct 
them, an attempt which still pursues its work. They 
lived and wrote in sympathy with the emotions which 
this long struggle created in the minds of men, and ex- 
pressed as much of these emotions as naturally fell within 
their capability and within the sphere of poetry. And 
this they did with great eagerness and intensity. Their 
love of beauty and of their art was unbroken, and they 
had as much power, as they had desire, to shape the 
thought and the loveliness they saw — great poets who 
have illuminated, impelled, adorned, and exalted the 
world in which we live. 

At first the great inquiry into the roots of things dis- 
turbed the next generation of poets, those who stepped 
to the front between 1850 and i860 ; and as Arthur Hugh 
Clough expressed the trouble of the want of clear light 
on the fates of men and their only refuge in duty, so 
Matthew Arnold>more deeply troubled, embodied in his 
poetry, even in his early book of 1852, the restlessness, 
the dimness, the hopelessness of a world which had lost 
the vision of the ancient stars and could cling to nothing 
but a stoic conduct. But he did this with keen sorrow, 
and with a vivid interest in the world around him. Then 
about i860 the poets grew weary of the whole struggle. 
Theology, the just aim and ends of life, science, political 
and social questions, ceased on the whole to awaken the 
slightest interest in them. Exactly that which took place 
in the case of Keats now took place. The poets sought 



Vin POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 249 

only for what was beautiful, romantic, of ancient heroism, 
far from a tossed and wearied world, far from all its 
tiresome questions. Dante G. Rossetti, whose sister, 
Christina, touched the romantic and religious lyric with 
original beauty, was the leader of this school. He, and 
others still aHve, found their chief subjects in ancient 
Rome and Greece, in stories and lyrics of passion, in 
mediaeval romance, in Norse legends, in the old England 
of Chaucer, and in Italy. But this literary poetry has 
now almost ceased to be produced, and has been suc- 
ceeded as in 1825 by a vast criticism of poetry, and by a 
multitudinous production, much inspired from France, of 
poetry, chiefly lyrical, which has few elements of endur- 
ance and little relation to life. What will emerge from 
this we cannot tell, but we only need some new human 
inspiration, having a close relation to the present, and 
bearing with it a universal emotion, to create in England 
another school of poetry as "great as that which arose in 
the beginning of this century, and worthy of the tradi- 
tions which have made England the creator and lover of 
poetry for more than 1200 years. 



250 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER IX 

PROSE LITERATURE FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE 
DEATH OF GEORGE ELIOT (1832-1881) 

158. The Growth of the Reading Public. — It has been 
pointed out (page 196) that, with the middle of the 
eighteenth century, there began in England a period of 
rapid increase in manufactures, science, and prosperity, 
which was paralleled by a remarkable growth in litera- 
ture. This increase in material welfare has continued 
throughout the nineteenth century. Science has made 
greater progress within a hundred years than within the 
five preceding centuries, and the discoveries of science 
have affected in a most wonderful way the lives of men. 
The greater part of the population of Great Britain, even 
people of the smallest means, may live in accordance 
with nature's laws, supplied with proper food, water, 
clothing, and shelter, and free from dangerous epi- 
demics. Laws have given greater liberty to the indi- 
vidual, have mitigated the lot of the poor and unfortunate, 
and have helped to reform the vicious. Improvements 
in machinery, the growth of commerce, and the colonisa- 
tion of new lands, have aided in the greater diffusion of 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 2$ I 

wealth among the people; and, though various industrial 
and economic causes still tend to crowd the poor into 
unhealthy districts of large cities, and deprive them of 
the full rewards of their labour, it is, in the main, true 
that, in point of material welfare, the average English- 
man has at his command far more means towards health 
and happiness than he would have had a century ago. 
Education, too, is more widely spread: we all know 
more of the essential facts of history and principles of 
science, have a truer idea of what life means, and are 
thus better prepared to enjoy and appreciate literature. 

This increase in material prosperity has been accom- 
panied by a remarkable growth in population. In 1800 
the population of Great Britain and Ireland was about 
15,000,000. In 1899 it is about 40,000,000. If, 
moreover, we would estimate the present extent of the 
English-speaking race, we must add to these 40,000,000 
the even greater population of the United States, as well 
as the English-speaking population of the colonies and 
possessions of Great Britain in various parts of the world. 
The total would probably exceed 125,000,000. 

With this growth of English-speaking people in many 
separate lands, it has come about that each of the large 
bodies of the race has developed, to some extent, its 
own special literature; and within a century it will 
probably be necessary to discuss, not only the literature 
of England itself, but that of Canada and Australia, just 
as, in subsequent chapters, we find it necessary to treat 
briefly of literature in the United States of America, or, 



252 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

as it is loosely called, American literature. For the 
present we can afford to neglect, in a sketch of English 
literature, the literature of the British colonies; but it is 
important that we should remember that the boundaries 
of the reading public are no longer those of the times of 
Addison, when there was little writing outside of Lon- 
don, and authors there felt that they were addressing 
largely their own immediate circle of friends and fellow- 
citizens. For, though no one book, except the Bible, 
can be known to even a majority of the great total 
referred to, any book in English may, according to the 
degree to which it is fitted to instruct and entertain the 
people, reach the hands of multitudes of men, women, 
and children, not only in England, but wherever the 
English tongue is spoken. The English language, too, 
has become so important that it is understood by many 
cultivated people of other nationalities, so that an Eng- 
lish book of merit may also be read in all civilised 
countries. The city-audience of the beginning of the 
eighteenth century has thus, at the end of the nineteenth 
century, become almost a world-audience. 

Many changes, similar to those mentioned in pages 
196-98, have also come about in the tastes and needs of 
the wide public to whom the literature of this century 
is addressed : — 

(i) As has been explained above (page 196), a good 
prose style has been inherited from the eighteenth cen- 
tury and has been perfected in this century. Educated 
men are born, as it werC;, into a good school of compo- 



J 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 253 

sition, and, profiting by the experience of their prede- 
cessors, do not now have to discover for themselves how 
to make their meaning clear and their style effective. 

(2) The increase in health, wealth, and comfort on 
the part of the people at large has given us leisure to 
read and means to purchase books, while the extraordi- 
nary development of railways and of postal and tele- 
graph systems has, in many respects, made each of the 
English-speaking nations almost a unit in feeling, and 
has greatly increased the bonds of sympathy and under- 
standing between them. The whole race may know 
almost immediately what is known and felt by any large 
body of individuals in it. The common interests of the 
race are thus emphasised, and the thought of any indi- 
vidual stimulated and broadened by his acquaintance 
with the experience of his brothers. 

(3) The same and similar causes have given a great 
impetus to the press. Not only are many more books 
printed than formerly; not only have newspapers in- 
creased rapidly in numbers and circulation; but there 
has arisen a host of periodicals, published weekly or at 
longer intervals, devoted less to news than to literature, 
which together reach a large part of the reading public. 
It may even be doubted whether the reading of people, 
at the end of the century, does not consist less of books 
than of periodicals of various sorts, including news- 
papers. This enormous growth of periodical literature 
has been rendered possible by the inventions that make 
printing less costly and more rapid, and by the fact that 



254 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

periodicals receive for the advertising of merchandise 
large sums which may be drawn upon for the payment 
of authors and artists. Books and periodicals have 
become cheaper, and, through the better organisation of 
the publishing trade, more easily obtainable. It is now 
possible to procure, for a comparatively small sum, a 
library which even fifty years ago would have been 
beyond the means of any but the rich. 

(4) It has been remarked (page 197) that in the 
eighteenth century communication with the continent 
of Europe increased, so that English literature stimu- 
lated that of other European nations, and was in turn 
stimulated by them. This process still continues. The 
civilised world has in some respects become a single 
body, for purposes of culture; and ideas or works of 
art that appeal strongly to one nation have their influ- 
ence upon all. With regard to English literature more 
particularly, it is noteworthy that a similar process has 
tended to remove the barriers between different classes 
of the reading public. The reduction in the price of 
printed matter; the increase in the amount; the growth 
of rapid communication; the consequent increase in 
knowledge, on the part of each individual or commu- 
nity, of what is thought and done by other individuals 
or communities; the industrial and legal changes that 
have tended to obliterate the differences in experience 
and opportunity between rich and poor; the decay of 
social distinctions; the increase in education among all 
classes, — all these have assisted in bringing about a 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 255 

remarkable unity of sentiment. An author may feel 
not only that he addresses a large audience, but that he 
is, to a great degree, in sympathy with large and appar- 
ently diverse portions of that audience. Nor is he 
addressing men alone, for, from the eighteenth century 
on, with new opportunities for education, women have 
constituted an increasingly large part of the English 
reading public, which is now composed of both sexes 
and of all classes, in many lands. 

The expansion of the reading public, which is char- 
acteristic of this century and which has been described 
above, and the accompanying increase in the production 
of printed matter, make it exceedingly difficult to sum- 
marise the history of English literature in this century. 
We must limit ourselves by speaking, with only the rarest 
exceptions, of men no longer living, and of English 
authors who have exerted a strong influence on the more 
thoughtful parts of this public. We must necessarily 
omit many such authors, but we must be careful not to 
include authors whose works, though they were widely 
circulated and became favourites with large numbers of 
people, have failed to exert a permanent influence, and, 
with slight changes of the popular taste, have passed into 
oblivion. 

159. The Victorian Age. — The period of prosperity 
which dawned upon England at about the time of Queen 
Victoria's accession to the throne, and which has lasted 
throughout the century, has been attended by an intel- 
lectual and emotional awakening of the nation, of which 



256 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the growth of the reading public is merely a sign. In 
the fine arts, in the industrial arts, in pure and applied 
science, — in all branches of human activity, — the 
period has been one of continuous development. The 
literature of the period has been remarkable for its 
variety and excellence, not only in poetry, but in the 
several branches of prose. It has been lacking only in 
the drama, which has been so inconspicuous that we 
need not again refer to it. This lack seems to be mainly 
due to the fact that, following the line of Scott's suc- 
cesses, authors have cultivated the novel, which has 
throughout the century been the most profitable branch 
of literature, and to the fact that until recently it has 
been possible for the managers of theatres to please their 
audiences by the translation or adaptation of clever 
French plays. 

160. The Romantic School in Prose. — The romantic 
school in poetry has been clearly described in the pre- 
ceding chapter (pages 213-18). From the middle of the 
eighteenth century on, men had been turning away from 
the more formal classic models, and had been increas- 
ingly influenced by earlier English poetry, by the 
quaintness and romance of mediaeval life, by a desire 
to make use of the more impressive elements of verse, 
and, especially, by a growing sympathy for that in life 
which had the greatest emotional value. Under. such 
influences the poetry of the nineteenth century became, 
in many respects, radically different from that of the 
eighteenth. The same influences were working to trans- 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 257 

form prose literature, both in matter and in style. As 
to matter, it will be noticed that in this century writers 
have been deeply interested in the emotional life of the 
past and the present, tending in novels to the narration 
of stirring incidents or the portrayal of striking types, 
and, in other forms of prose, to whatever moved the 
hearts of the people through beauty, sympathy, sense of 
contrast, or the embodiment of vigorous ideals. They 
have been anxious to draw on all material that would 
incite us to tears or laughter, or that would fill us with 
enthusiasm, or that seemed to involve impressive or 
impelling truths. This impulse has been, to a great 
extent, shared by the other great European literatures. 
It has persisted throughout the century, and is still, in 
a somewhat modified form, a dominant force. 

161. The Scientific Movement. — Less easily recog- 
nised, less often flowering into great literature, there 
runs throughout the period a strong impulse towards 
research and observation, towards the accurate and dis- 
passionate statement of the full truth in all branches of 
human knowledge. In science, men who appreciated 
the grandeur and dignity of their calling have made 
efforts to make clear to the common people the results 
of organised investigation; in history and economics, 
to make clear the real purport of past and present events 
and the principles of human action involved; and in 
philosophy, theology, and kindred subjects of enquiry, 
to learn the truth at all costs and to reproduce it faith- 
fully. In the novel a similar impulse, common to most 
s 



258 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

modern literatures, has led some writers to a more de- 
tailed observation of the facts of life, and to the presen- 
tation of them in a less fanciful fashion. This method 
is called " realism." It was at first feared that the whole 
scientific movement would tend to weaken the power of 
the imagination in literature; but there seems to be 
room in our hearts for both interests, — that in life as 
portrayed by the skilled observer and that in life as 
portrayed by the man of imagination, — -and it is grow- 
ing clearer that the two can often be combined. 

162. Prose Style in the Nineteenth Century. — By 
the middle of the eighteenth century a good prose style 
had already been formed. It was clear and orderly, — 
the courteous language of accomplished gentlemen, — 
and was free from the intricacy and eccentricity of earlier 
periods. In Goldsmith it was simple and flowing; in 
Johnson, dignified, if not pompous; in Burke and Gib- 
bon, sonorous. In the nineteenth century the essential 
qualities of clearness and dignity have been perpetuated; 
but we have also learned to expect, in prose literature, 
a certain melody or singing quality, as if the writer were 
appealing to the ear even more than to the eye; and, 
even when this is absent, at least an earnest eloquence, 
as is appropriate when the appeal is to the emotions as 
well as to the intellect. 

163. The Novel. — From Defoe to Scott the hold of 
the novel on the public grew stronger. Each great 
novelist, moreover, added something to the development 
of his art. Defoe taught his skill in arousing curiosity; 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 259 

Richardson, the use of detail and of sentiment; Field- 
ing, the creation of characters that have all the sem- 
blance of reality; Smollett, the force of rough humour 
and the sketching of whimsical characters; Miss Austen, 
the building up of characters through minute observa- 
tion, Scott first gave the modern public the taste for 
the rapidly moving tale of romantic adventure. 

Dickens succeeded Scott as a popular favourite, but 
before taking him up we must speak of several novelists 
of less importance in the early part of the century. 
Frederick Marryat followed Smollett in his rough tales 
of sea life, the best of which are Peter Simple (1834) 
and Mr. Midship7nan Easy (1836). Full of eccentric 
characters, practical jokes, and amusing incidents, they 
portrayed so admirably the bluff and hearty side of 
active life as long to keep their freshness and charm. 
Charles Lever, an Irishman, in Charles O' Ma Iky 
(1841) and many other tales of the same sort, did for 
the army what Marryat did for the navy. His novels 
are weak in plot, but full of dashing adventure and 
bubbling over with merriment. Benjamin Disraeli, 
Earl of Beaconsfield, the great Tory statesman, was 
the author of many novels dealing with fashionable 
life, of which the best are perhaps Coningsby (1844) 
and Sybil (1845), which have in common the motive 
of explaining the principles and ideals on which he 
based . the reconstruction of his party. Loose in plot, 
but brilliant in style, they won the public partly 
through their cleverness, partly because they dealt 



26o ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 

with the rich and the great, and partly because they are 
mainly biographies, as it were, of ardent, impression- 
able, and ambitious minds. They are likewise remark- 
able because in them, for the first time in English 
literature, were revealed the brilliance and wisdom of 
the Jewish race. Edward Lytton Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 
more commonly known as Bulwer- Lytton, wrote a long 
series of novels with the definite purpose of entertaining 
the public. They were of many sorts, as became his 
versatile genius, and were received with favour partly 
because, like Disraeli's, they drew many of their charac- 
ters from high life, of which the growing multitude of 
readers heard with delight, but chiefly because they often 
dealt with mystery and crime, and because, again like 
Disraeli's tales, they followed Byron's narrative poems 
in presenting, in an heroic light, men of great ambition, 
whether for good or for ill. Romanticism worshipped 
the individual whose spirit was high and whose will was 
strong. The novel of Bulwer-Lytton's that retains its 
interest most permanently is The Last Days of Pompeii 
(1834), which is fortunate in having as its theme one 
of the most tragic events in all history. George Bor- 
Row's intimate acquaintance with the Gypsies and his 
experiences as a colporteur in Spain gave him material 
for The Bible in Spain (1843), Lavengro (185 1), and 
other volumes of romantic adventure. To Charlotte 
Bronte belongs the distinction of having produced per- 
haps the most typical English novel of the Romantic 
school, y^«(? Eyre (1847), the heroine of which conceals 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 26 1 

an indomitable will under the exterior of a quiet and 
plain governess, on whom is centred the fiery passion 
of a grim hero of higher station. 

The real successor of Scott, however, was Charles 
Dickens, who, from Pickwick Papers (1837) to Our 
Mutual Friend (1865), poured forth a series of re- 
markable novels, which were read wherever the English 
tongue was known, and which made their author beloved 
from the palace of the prince to the camp of the Cali- 
fornian miner. If Scott was the Wizard of the North, 
Dickens was the Wizard of the South. He had Scott's 
genius for story-telling; he knew the way to the hearts 
of the people; and, at a time when the uniformity of 
modern life was beginning to do away with many of the 
external differences between persons and places, he fol- 
lowed Smollett in creating a host of odd characters, 
taken largely from the ranks of the poor and the humble. 
These fantastic figures he produced in such numbers and 
with such vitality that they form a little world of their 
own; and we often say of odd people that they look as 
if they had stepped from the pages of Dickens. His 
tales all appeal strongly to the emotions, sometimes by 
humour, sometimes by horror or pathos. They all have 
a strong dramatic element, — are now farcical, now 
melodramatic, and, at their best, delightful comedies. 
His queer characters have the semblance of life, but we 
feel them to be creatures of the fancy, who could not 
exist in an actual world. In spite of this, he was a man 
who knew well what English life was, especially among 



262 ENGLISH LITERATURE ChaP. 

the poorer classes, and earnestly tried to make it better 
by picturing its evils; and his tender heart and the won- 
derful power of his fancy made him one of the great 
English story-tellers. 

Equally great as a master of tears and gentle laughter 
was William Makepeace Thackeray, who, though less 
widely popular than Dickens, was, and is, on the whole, 
a greater favourite with readers of more social expe- 
rience. Of gentler birth, breeding, and education, 
Thackeray began his career by dabbling both in art and 
in letters; and it was only in 1848, when Vanity Fair 
appeared, that the public realised that a new and great 
interpreter of life had arisen. Vanity Fair was followed 
by Pendennis (1850), Esmond (1852), The Newco7?ies 
(1855), and The Virginians (1859), as well as by two 
volumes of lectures, English Humourists (1853) and 
The Four Georges (i860). A just idea of Thackeray's 
merits can be obtained by contrasting his work with 
that of Dickens. (i) In the field of the creative 
imagination they are both great, but Thackeray's char- 
acters belong largely to the so-called upper classes. 
(2) Thackeray's characters, like those of Fielding, 
impress one less as odd than as real, less as what 
we could fancy ourselves as being than as what we 
are. (3) Thackeray does not so much tell a rapid 
and exciting tale as follow a curious form of confidential 
address, as if he were actually speaking directly to the 
reader. His style and his matter are full of the personal 
qualities of a man who, by sympathy and experience, 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 263 

knew the life of the social world, and presented his 
views, without exaggeration, in the careless but modu- 
lated voice of a gentleman in conversation. The absence 
of melodrama in his writings, and his habit of gently 
railing at cant and hypocrisy in all its forms, have some- 
times brought on him the reproach of cynicism; but it 
is now more apparent that his zeal was always for truth 
and honour. He felt stirring in his own heart the im- 
pulses that led now to virtue, now to vice, and was too 
candid to represent life as other than it was; too full of 
sympathy with all his brother-men to represent them 
otherwise than as compounded of the clay of which we 
all are fashioned. His Henry Esmond is generally 
agreed to be, of all historical novels in English, that 
which most faithfully reproduces the life of a vanished 
epoch, and may profitably be contrasted, in its methods, 
with Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. 

Marian Evans, who wrote under the name of George 
Eliot, was a country girl of great power of mind and 
much learning, who reached middle life before she 
realised that she had a natural talent for the creation of 
character and the telling of tales. In her first stories 
and novels, — Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede 
(1859), The Mill on the Floss (i860), Silas Marner 
(1861), — she revealed her talent, and displayed also, 
in dealing with simple and earnest characters and with 
country life, much power of humour, of pathos, and 
even of tragedy, and especially a deep feeling for moral 
problems. In her later works, — Romola (1863), Felix 



264 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

IIolt{i^66)y Middlemarch (1872), and Daniel Deronda 
(1876), — she threw an increasingly greater stress on 
ethical problems, so that her novels became really studies 
in the portrayal of the conscience and moral develop- 
ment or retrogression of men and women. Those who 
like best novels dealing with the lighter sides of life, or 
those in which the ethical purpose is less explicit, have 
thought her later work inferior to her earlier; but the 
English public has always gladly read literature in which 
such purposes were prominent, and George Eliot's hold 
on the people at large has not been greatly weakened on 
this account. Less famous than Scott, Dickens, and 
Thackeray, she retains an honoured place in English 
literature by right of her power as a story-teller and a 
creator of character, and of her success in dealing with 
the moral and religious elements in life. 

Our century has been rich in minor novelists, each 
with a special claim to recognition. Mrs. Gaskell is 
best known by her Cranford (1853), a story of village 
life which reveals both sympathy and close observation, 
and which has become a classic. Anihony Trollope 
wrote more than any of his contemporaries, and though 
his quiet but pleasing novels of life in the country and 
in the cathedral towns, of which Barchester Towers 
(1857) is a good example, never reached the first rank, 
they were almost uniform in excellence, and won, to no 
small degree, the favour of the public. Charles Reade 
wrote with more vivacity. His was a manly spirit, hating 
fraud and useless convention: and his novels, of which 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 26^ 

Put Yourself in his Place (1870) is typical, strike at the 
false and commend the true in modern civilisation. 
He was also the author of a good historical novel, 
The Cloister and the Hearth {\Z(iO). Charles Kingsley 
was a clergyman and a reformer, and his novels, like 
himself, were overflowing with physical energy and 
moral earnestness. He is best known by a charming tale 
for children. The Water Badies {1^)62,), and by two his- 
torical novels, Hypatia{\Z^-^ and Westward Ho ! (1855). 
Greater than any of these writers is George Meredith, 
whose Richard Feverel (1859), Beauchamp's Career 
(1875), ^iid Diana of the Cf^ossways (1885) have been 
recognised by acute readers as showing a rare power of 
analysing the more subtle sides of human nature, and a 
rare power of portraying characters of great charm and 
nobility. Unfortunately, a somewhat whimsical style 
and method of narration has kept him from being as 
widely read as Dickens and Thackeray, to whose class 
he belongs by the type and scope of his genius. 

The last third of the century has seen, in Europe, the 
rise of the realistic school of fiction, which endeavours 
to give an accurate picture of life as it actually appears 
to the observer, but which, on the continent, has shown 
a tendency to take for its subject-matter, in many in- 
stances, vice and crime and the ignoble side of man's 
character. English fiction, throughout the century, has, 
on the whole, preferred to follow a less scientific and 
more purely fanciful or idealistic method, though from 
Jane Austen down a strong undercurrent of realism 



266 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAI. 

has, from time to time, made itself manifest; the ten- 
dency to treat dispassionately of crime and vice has 
been wholly absent. While standing somewhat aloof, in 
this respect, from the realistic movement, English fic- 
tion has, in the last two decades of the century, revived 
the novel of romantic adventure, returning to the field 
opened by Scott; and the public, perhaps a little weary 
of novels of society, reform, and ethics, has welcomed 
the change. Of the new writers of tales of adventure by 
sea and land the chief was Robert Louis Stevenson, 
who, while himself fighting bravely against disease, 
delighted young and old by his New Arabian Nights 
(1882), Treasure Island (1883), a tale of pirates, and 
by Kidnapped (1886) and The Master of Ballantrae 
(1889), in which the elements of adventure and of char- 
acter are cunningly combined. 

The nineteenth century has done its work in present- 
ing us with almost all the possible ways of treating human 
life in fiction. The twentieth century must follow the 
general methods of the nineteenth, combining and ex- 
tending them, as our century has done with the methods 
of Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett. A very great 
number of novels is published each year, but it is plain 
that, though many writers are skilled in this form of 
composition, few or none give promise of becoming 
masters. It is plain, too, that the hold of the short story 
is growing stronger. What the nineteenth century has 
taught us is sympathy. We have learned to feel, through 
the art of the narrator, what men and women are doing 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO l88l 26> 

and suffering throughout the world; and we give our 
sympathy both to the more complex group of characters 
and more intricate series of events portrayed in the novel 
and to those indicated in the less detailed, more rapid 
and suggestive short story, the very movement and brevity 
of which seem so highly typical of modern life and 
emotion. 

164. History. —We now turn to other branches of 
prose-writing, in which, not through fictions, but by the 
clear and impressive statement of what they believed to 
be facts and principles, men have won honour and influ- 
ence over their fellows. 

The essays and history of Thomas Babington Macaulay 
have been almost as widely read as the novels of Scott 
and Dickens. He had been a precocious boy, with a 
prodigious memory, great industry, and a genius for the 
accumulation and organisation of facts; and he was but 
a young man when, in 1825, he astonished the public 
by a remarkable essay on Milton, in which he sketched 
rapidly, but brilliantly, the life, works, and times of 
the Puritan poet. From his first essay to his last, 
Macaulay' s skill, vivacity, and information never 
flagged, and he became the people's great painter of 
historical scenes and historical characters, excelling 
in his power of visualising the events and the per- 
sonages of the past. This power was even more 
clearly shown in the uncompleted History of England 
fro?n the Accession of Jaines II. (1848-60). Mac- 
aulay wrote at a time when the reading public was 



268 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAF 

rapidly increasing, when knowledge of history was like- 
wise growing, and when, partly led on by Scott, men 
were eager to understand and realise for themselves the 
character and meaning of past events. That Macaulay 
was able to satisfy this longing was due not only to 
his power of imagination, but to his clear, rapid, 
and entertaining style, which had a strong influence 
on journalism and letters. Macaulay's mind was down- 
right and positive. His information was often insuf- 
ficient, his judgment hasty, his attitude prejudiced; but 
his clear and brilliant intellect and his clear and brill- 
iant style made him, of all the writers of the century, 
the greatest populariser of history. 

Thomas Carlyle was a man of a wholly different sort. 
He had known poverty, physical pain, and mental suffer- 
ing. He was irritable, morose, inclined to believe that 
most men were fools, and that what truth and nobility 
there was in the world was disguised and concealed by 
the wrappings of hypocrisy, cant, and affectation. His 
first important work, Sartor Resartus (1834), a "philoso- 
phy of clothes," expresses in a grotesque form this pes- 
simistic feeling and his resolve to find and hold fast to 
the truth in a world of shams. It was this resolve 
that led him to the field of history. In The French 
Revolution (1837), Heroes a?id Hero Worship (1841), 
Cromwell'' s Letters and Speeches (1845), and History 
of Frederick U (1858-65), he expounded with great 
energy and vividness the idea that the truly great 
menj the heroes, are those who battle against the 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1 832 TO 1 88 1 269 

folly and vice of the multitudes, and that it is they 
who should be admired and followed as prophets 
and teachers. Carlyle's style is broken and grotesque, 
but at times full of grandeur. His great power ovei 
men lay in his genius for worshipping the noble and 
energetic and steadfast in warrior-characters; in a skill 
not wholly unlike Macaulay's in visualising their acts 
and their surroundings; and in a power transcending 
Macaulay's for analysing and appreciating the motives 
that sway men. Carlyle also exerted a strong influence 
on the thought and literature of the century by introduc- 
ing into England a knowledge of German philosophy 
and letters, which were at that time of a particularly 
stimulating character. 

Comparable with Macaulay and Carlyle in the power 
of imaginative visualisation of the past Avas James An- 
thony Froude, whose History of England fj'om the Fall 
of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Artnada (1856-69) charmed 
all by its brilliant and rapid style, its grasp alike of 
character and of political history, and its note of patri- 
otic devotion. With all this, Froude was peculiarly 
prone to errors of fact and of judgment. 

Throughout the century there have been many histori- 
ans of note, but, with the possible exception of John 
Richard Green, whose Short History of the English 
People (1874) combined a picturesque and sympathetic 
style with painstaking accuracy and sound scholarship, 
they wrote for the learned public, and have been little 
known or appreciated by the general public. Among 



270 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP, 

these are the two historians of Greece, George Grote 
and Bishop Thirlwall; Dean Milman, the historian of 
Latin Christianity; and Charles Merivale, the historian 
of the Roman Empire. To these names, which show how 
English interest clung to the history of classical and 
early Christian times, should be added those of Henry 
Thomas Buckle, author of a stimulating but incom- 
plete History of Civilisation in Europe (1857-61), and 
Edward Augustus Freeman, whose elaborate History 
of the No7-maji Conquest (1867-76) was perhaps the 
most painstakingly accurate English historical work of 
the century. 

165. Criticism. — We now turn to a group of writers 
who were scarcely less important than Macaulay and 
Carlyle, in that they helped to improve the taste of the 
public and to stimulate, to a considerable degree, inter- 
est in art and letters. Chief among these was John 
RusKiN, whose enthusiasm for nature and art and con- 
stant appeal to the emotions rather than to the intellect 
mark his kinship with the poets and novelists of the 
romantic school. In his two longer works, Modern 
Painters (1843-60) and Stones of Venice (1851-53), as 
well as in many minor writings, he called forcibly to 
the attention of his countrymen — at a time when the 
tendency was to conventionalise art and to make social 
economics a matter of abstract calculation — the minute 
beauties of nature, especially in clouds and mountains, 
the charm and inner meaning of mediaeval and Renais- 
sance art, and the forgotten truths that even humble call- 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 27I 

ings have a dignity of their own when rightly followed, 
and that happiness is not to be measured by rank nor 
value and worth by gold alone. Full of prejudices, an 
implacable foe to modern industrial progress, often 
lacking in accurate knowledge of the matters he treated, 
and prone to make laws of art by generalisation from 
his personal fancies, he was, in spite of all this, a power- 
ful influence in breaking down foolish conventions and 
in opening the eyes of many to the beauty of the art of 
the past and to the glory and shame of contemporary 
civilisation. His style is among the most beautiful 
in English literature, — rich and sonorous, with a lyric 
swing and cadence. 

Matthew Arnold performed a service for literature 
somewhat similar to that which Ruskin performed for 
art, though he appealed less to the emotions of his 
readers and more to their critical faculties. He wrote 
much on questions of Church and State, and much in 
analysis of existing social conditions, frequently in a 
tone half-bantering, half-serious. His more permanent 
work is contained in his two series of Essays in Criti- 
cism (1865, 1888), in which he tried to make clear that 
scholars and thoughtful people generally throughout all 
Europe were attacking the problems of literature, phi- 
losophy, science, and kindred subjects in much the same 
orderly way, and in accordance with much the same 
fundamental beliefs and principles. He illustrated this 
conception by a critical estimate of several famous 
authors, in essays which have themselves become famous, 



2/2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and did a great deal to convince the public that judg- 
ments as to the kind or value of literary productions are 
not matters of whim or fancy, but may be profitably dis- 
cussed on the basis of aesthetic and ethical principles. 
Arnold's style was calm and resolute, and owed much 
of its effectiveness to his curious habit of repeating at 
intervals a phrase or catchword, such as " sweetness and 
light," which recalled forcibly his main tenet. Arnold 
was dogmatic in his opinions, but he always explained 
his reasons for holding them; and one who disagreed 
with his results could determine how and why the dis- 
agreement came about. He thus acted as a clarifier of 
thought in every field which he touched. 

Ruskin and Arnold, with Carlyle, were the great 
influences on criticism in this period, but two minor 
critics of literature deserve mention, Walter Bagehot 
and Walter Pater. Bagehot was a banker, and ren- 
dered criticism and literature itself an important service 
by neglecting the implicit convention of men of letters 
that criticism belonged to them alone, and, without pre- 
tence at an elaborate style or method, by showing what 
judgment an acute man of affairs had to pass on books 
and authors. It thus became clear — and it is each year 
growing clearer — ^that literature is written for all, and 
may be fairly judged by all who read with open eyes and 
an open heart. Pater rendered criticism an equally 
great service by the extraordinary subtlety and skill of 
his analysis of all aesthetic pleasures. Practically with- 
out a profession, he lived a life of leisure and seclusion, 



IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 2/3 

devoting himself entirely to the quest of the beautiful 
and the delicate analysis of all its effects. He be- 
lieved that each art, and each work of any of the 
arts, has its own peculiar note, as it were, of beauty, 
and can be best enjoyed when that note is discov- 
ered and appreciated. This stimulating conception 
was developed in Studies in the Renaissance (1873) 
and Appreciations (1889). He was also the author of 
Marius the Epicurean (1885), an historical novel, in 
which the philosophic, religious, and literary thought 
of the second century was analysed in accordance with 
the same principle. 

166. Theology, Philosophy, and Science. ^ — England 
has been lacking in great theologians and philosophers 
during this period. In religious literature the strongest 
influence was that of John Henry Newman; in philoso- 
phy, that of John Stuart Mill. The circumstances of 
Cardinal Newman's career, no less than his high abili- 
ties, made him the most distinguished representative in 
English-speaking countries of an historic church; and 
his voice, in the minds of many, came to stand for all 
the processes of thought and feeling involved in Chris- 
tianity as an ancient organised body of belief and tra- 
dition. His style, too, was resonant and powerful, yet 
subtle, and based on Roman models; and its exquisite 
purity and dignity gain by contrast with the emotional 
whimsicalities of Carlyle, and even of Ruskin. His 
many volumes of sermons, his Idea of a University 
(1854), his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), and other 

T 



274 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP, 

works of greater or less importance, had a strong 
influence on thoughtful men, who found in them 
an almost perfect expression of noble and spiritual 
thoughts. 

Mill was eminent in metaphysics; but it is character- 
istic of him and his race that he devoted his attention, 
with scarcely less persistence and success, to questions 
of ethics, economics, and public welfare, as in his essays 
on Liberty (1859) and on The Subjectio7i of Women 
(1869), the latter a plea for the emancipation of women. 
A similar devotion to public welfare was prominent 
in the English scientific work of the last part of the 
century. 

England's greatest contribution to science during the 
century was the fertile thought conceived at practically 
the same period by Alfred Russel Wallace and 
Charles Darwin, and first formulated by Darwin in his 
On the Origin of Species (1859), and later works, that 
the whole development of life on the planet was due to 
the modification of heredity by the law of natural selec- 
tion. This gave impulse to a great movement of research, 
carried on by groups of scholars throughout the civilised 
world, which has resulted in an almost complete change 
in the conception of man's relation to the universe, and 
which has stimulated, if not transformed, history and 
psychology and all cognate branches of thought. Most 
of these scholars have written for the learned public 
alone, but we must mention several who have served 
truth and their country well by popularising, to some 



ix PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 2^5 

degree, the results of research, — John Tyndall, a great 
physicist; Thomas Huxley, who did much to make 
clear the meaning of evolution and its bearing on ethics 
and religion; and Herbert Spencer, the formulator of 
a system of philosophy based on the principle of 
evolution. 



276 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAi 



CHAPTER X 

POETRY FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE DEATHS OB 
TENNYSON AND BROWNING (1832-1892) 

167. Alfred Tennyson. — In treating the poetry of the 
period it is necessary only to expand the sketch given 
in pages 243-49. Alfred Tennyson was, in many re- 
spects, the most remarkable author of the century in 
England. From early manhood to extreme old age he 
put his verse before the public, which at first, following 
the critics, read him grudgingly and then with increas- 
ing approbation, until, from l7i Memoriam (1850) to 
the Death of (Enone (1892), he reached the hearts of 
the English-speaking race as no man had before him. 
That he was appreciated so widely was partly due to the 
influences (pages 250-55) that had created a vast reading 
public, and had put all parts of it, realising their com- 
mon humanity, into sympathy with one another; but it 
is also due to the genius of the singer. His themes were 
such as had long filled the hearts of all, but had hitherto 
received no adequate expression. He sang of patriot- 
ism, of passionate regret for the beloved dead, of hope 
and faith in God and man and heaven, of constancy in 



X POETRY FROM 1832 TO 1892 277 

love, of noble ideals of purity and honour, of all the 
struggles that lead us higher. He was master of every 
form of lyric and narrative verse, combining the melody 
of Coleridge, the colour of Keats, the story-telling power 
of Scott, the ethical impulse of Wordsworth, Living 
aloof from the crowd, he was independent of political 
or religious creeds, or social coteries, and was thus in 
his seclusion a poet of pure contemplation, free to 
reflect in his poems the currents of thought and feeling 
in his day, without giving them a partisan form. He 
pleased all classes of the public : the acutely literary by 
the exquisite finish of his form, no less than by qualities 
that appealed to the people at large — the melody of his 
song and the sweep of his blank verse. He became 
poet-laureate in 1850 by royal command, but he was 
none the less so by national acclamation. 

168. Robert Browning was almost the exact contem- 
porary of Tennyson, and throughout a long life devoted 
himself to poetry with equal earnestness. A man of 
genius, with great stores of information, a mind of ex- 
traordinary acuteness, and a creative imagination of the 
first rank, he had not the qualities that allowed him to 
appeal strongly to the great public, which was bewildered 
by his Sordello (1840). It was not until the appearance 
of Meji and Women (1855) that he acquired a staunch 
following of ardent admirers, and not until the publica- 
tion of The Ring and the Book (1868) that he was gen- 
erally recognized as a great poet. He never became a 
national favourite, as did Tennyson, but he appealed 



2/8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

with great force to all who loved analysis of character. 
What stood in the way of Browning's popularity was, in 
part, his intricate manner of expression, but mainly the 
fact that, in the field of dramatic monologue, which he 
made his own, his purpose was to reveal the individu- 
ality by reproducing minute processes of thought. His 
hold on his admirers, now rapidly growing in numbers, 
is due partly to the rare melody of his verse in certain 
poems or isolated passages, but mainly to the mighty 
band of dramatis per soncB, of all times and nations, but 
chiefly, perhaps, of mediaeval Italy, which he created, 
— a band equalled only by that of Shakespeare, — and 
whose inner thoughts he analysed with marvellous reality. 
He thus satisfied to the full, in the more acute class of 
readers, the passion which has been one of the great 
strains of modern thought, — the passion for reproduc- 
tions in art of the life of typical men and women of the 
past. 

169. Other Poets. — Our century, so rich in great 
poets, was also rich in poets less great. Elizabeth 
Barrett Browning, the wife of Robert Browning, was 
another of the remarkable group of women who have 
been an essential element in the literature of this period, 
adding to it qualities which, in kind or in degree, are 
peculiarly feminine. Mrs. Browning had the woman's 
heart of spontaneous and undisciplined feeling, — over- 
flowing with pity and indignation, as in her humani- 
tarian protests for the oppressed; or with pure affection, 
as in her beautiful Sorinets from the Portuguese (1850). 



X POETRY FROM 1832 TO 1892 2/9 

Mention, too, must be made of Macaulay's Lays oj 
Ancient Rome (1842). His verses were mechanical, but 
they had a swing and force that made them favourites 
with many, particularly the young. Matthew Arnold 
and Arthur Hugh Clough (who were both affected 
deeply by the thought of their time, and remain, 
to a great extent, poets for scholars, rather than for 
the people); Charles Kingsley's fine ballads and 
Andromeda (1858), his experiment in hexameter ; and 
Edward Fitzgerald's remarkable translation of Omar 
Khayyam (1858), have already been mentioned (pages 
247-48). Two strains in our modern poetry remain to 
be spoken of. The first is that of the writers of vers de 
societe and of other forms of light and charming verse, 

— Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Charles Stuart Cal- 
verley, Frederick Locker- Lampson, Austin Dobson, 

— whose graceful art and whose influence in widening 
the scope of English poetry by introducing the ballade 
and other foreign forms of verse it would be churlish 
not to recognise and appreciate. The second is that of 
the poets sometimes called pre-Raphaelites, — Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, 
and Algernon Charles Swinburne (page 249), Rossetti 
was a painter of much skill and beauty, and Morris had, 
in several of the arts, and particularly in the handicrafts, 
a strong influence in bringing about a better condition 
of the public taste in household decoration. As artists 
and as poets the whole group turned for inspiration to the 
art and poetry of the Middle Ages, before Raphael set 



280 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the seal of academic convention on the young Renais^ 
sance, when each man in his own art created, with com- 
plete naivete, what seemed beautiful in his own eyes. 
An Italian by blood and temperament, Rossetti's trend 
was towards the Italian poetry of the thirteenth century, 
and especially its worship of beauty and its expression 
in the sonnet of the ecstasy of contemplative love. 
Morris loved to retell tales of mediaeval and ancient 
romance, in The Earthly Fa7'adise {i^6^-']o), Sigurd the 
Volsung (1876), and his translations of the ^neid (1876) 
and the Odyssey (1887). Swinburne turned to many 
sources, — to the Middle Ages, to the Elizabethans, to 
the Greeks, — for his inspiration, and, in his Atalanta in 
Calydon (1864) and Poems and Ballads (1866), thrilled 
men by a richness of rhythm and a harmony of sound 
which were new to English verse, and which have given 
him a strong influence over younger writers. But all 
these poets lived apart from the people, dazed by their 
own worship of vanished ideals, and out of sympathy 
with modern life. Their school ceases with their own 
voices, and the elements they contributed to English 
verse are absorbed, like so many others, in the great 
current of English poetry. 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 28 1 



CHAPTER XI 

PROSE LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES 

1 70. The Growth of a New Nation. — Settlements in 
the territory that now constitutes the United States were 
begun very early in the seventeenth century ; but it was 
not until well within the present century that the inhabi- 
tants of this land have come to consider themselves wholly 
as brothers. Nothing could have exceeded in diversity 
the elements that entered into the process of amalgama- 
tion. Along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts there were Eng- 
lish, Dutch, German, Swedish, French, Spanish, Scotch, 
and Irish colonists ; and after the struggle for indepen- 
dence was over, and especially after the opportunities 
existing in the new world became generally known, there 
have flocked to us, through every open gate, emigrants 
of all races and from all countries, but particularly from 
lands where severe governmental rule or harsh economic 
conditions have driven out the oppressed, the poor, or 
the ambitious. Diverse as were these elements, how- 
ever, the process of unification has gone steadily on. By 
far the majority of the early settlers were English, and, the 
original colonies belonging to the English crown or soon 



282 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

falling to it, the English speech became the official and 
current language. But, though using a single speech and 
subject to a single rule, it was long before the colonies 
reached uniformity of sentiment. Drawn together gradu- 
ally by common interests and mutual intercourse, it was 
only late in the eighteenth century that they timidly 
banded together to secure those interests. Carried further 
than they intended, they achieved independence, and 
became technically a nation. But even then a genuinely 
national spirit was, to a large degree, impossible. The 
states were full of jealousies and antipathies, falling, like 
the German states of the same period, into Httle geo- 
graphical groups. It was not until at least several decades 
of the nineteenth century had passed that the people of 
the United States grew to realise fully that they were 
brothers, and to develop, consciously and unconsciously, 
the policy and the temperament that were to distinguish 
them in many ways from their kindred across the sea. 
Indeed, we may say that it was not until the nation had 
spread from one ocean to the other, and until the most 
radical differences between parts of the country had been 
settled by the great Civil War and the mutual under- 
standing which slowly followed it, that the men of our 
land have felt that they were bound together by ties 
which cannot be broken. 

171. The Growth of a New Literature. — There were 
several causes which prevented the upgrowing of hterature 
in the United States until the nation had, to some extent, 
reached consciousness as a nation. First, the time and 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 283 

Strength of the colonists were filled with pressing and 
often perilous duties. At the outset these were so en- 
grossing that they took away alike the desire to produce 
literature and the desire to receive it. The life of con- 
templative leisure, which tends to foster literature, is still 
rare among us, for even when the more arduous duties of 
the pioneer were over, the impulse towards a life of 
activity was strong, as it must always be in a young state, 
and our best minds turned from the task of clearing a 
continent to the organising and upbuilding of a great 
commercial and industrial nation. Second, there were 
peculiar circumstances in the life of each section of the 
country that acted as a deterring force. In the southern 
colonies it was the fact that men lived mainly on planta- 
tions, somewhat isolated from their fellows, and that the 
influence of slavery tended to produce an aristocratic and 
unprogressive society. The middle colonies lacked the 
spur of high ideals, and cared more for commerce than 
for learning and the arts. In New England, on the other 
hand, where life was more strenuous, the influence of 
religion was blighting. Puritans of the Puritans, straitest 
of the sect, they regarded the works of the imagination 
as sinful, and their abnormal self-analysis and religious 
narrowness destroyed the element of beauty even in the 
literature of piety. Third, the ties that bound each 
colony to the mother country were stronger even than 
the ties that bound them to one another, and the litera- 
ture of England satisfied aU their needs. 

Thus it came about that little writing of merit was done 



284 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

in America until this century. We have, of course, the 
writings of such of the early explorers and settlers as were 
most impressed by the wonders of a virgin world, by their 
novel adventures, or by a dim vision of what civilisation 
on this continent might become. But quaint as these 
are, they can scarcely be counted as the beginnings of 
American literature. The succeeding generations of 
writers born on the new soil, the descendants of the 
pioneers, felt dimly that new thoughts were stirring within 
them ; but in all matters of expression they turned natur- 
ally to English models, — to Pope or Addison, — imitat- 
ing them consciously like unskilled novices. This period 
of apprenticeship lasted until after the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, broken only by a few men, to be 
mentioned later, who were too intent on ideas of great 
purport to follow any model slavishly. From the time 
of Irving on, however, we meet new conditions. The 
reading public was rapidly increasing, and cared more 
and more for the work of American authors. Beginning 
with Cooper, Hawthorne, and Emerson, American writers, 
too, began to look within their own hearts, rather than 
abroad, both for the matter of which they wrote, and for 
the manner in which they wrote. The national move- 
ment thus begun has grown in strength throughout the 
country. As generation succeeded generation, we have 
thought less and less of English models and tended more 
and more to the natural expression of our own thoughts. 

172. National Elements in American Literature. — Our 
literature is thus both dependent and independent, both 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 285 

a branch and a tree. The colonists came in the age of 
Shakespeare and Milton, bringing with them the glorious 
speech of the period and the staunch Enghsh temper of 
mind and body. The language still remains common to 
both nations, with only the sHghtest divergencies, due 
sometimes to the survival here of words or idioms that 
have now passed out of the British vocabulary, some- 
times to changes that have occurred in Great Britain 
within the last two centuries, and sometimes to similar 
changes in the United States, — changes which the di- 
verse elements in our population and the rapidly shifting 
experiences of our people have made peculiarly fitting. 
The racial traits of the English, especially those most 
firmly rooted in the Anglo-Saxon stock, have been pre- 
served in America ; but they have suffered a sea-change, 
remaining the same and yet becoming different. Just as 
it is impossible not to distinguish, as a rule, Americans 
from Englishmen by their voices, dress, demeanor, habits, 
and general theory of life, so it is impossible as a rule not 
to find in American and in Enghsh literature of this cen- 
tury somewhat different characteristics. To formulate 
these national elements in American hterature is a diffi- 
cult task, but we cannot easily err in pointing out three. 

First, American literature is in the main addressed to 
the people at large, rather than to any set or class, and 
is characterised by plainness and simplicity. It retains 
much of the savour of the eighteenth century, partly 
because the social centres in the United States were 
until recently compact, neighbourly little places, quite like 



2S6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the London of Queen Anne's day, and partly because the 
conditions of political and social life long tended to keep 
the citizen's mind peculiarly alert, as in the little eigh- 
teenth-century London, to matters of common interest 
and welfare. The characteristic American style is thus 
precisely what we should expect in a democracy : in 
prose, the plain diction of Emerson, Thoreau, and Lin- 
coln ; in poetry, the homely, domestic verse of Long- 
fellow and Whittier. Second, American literature is full 
of hope and resoluteness. At the close of the nine- 
teenth century the pioneers are still at their task in the 
extreme West as their ancestors were in the extreme 
East at the beginning of the seventeenth. The clearing of 
a continent has taught us self-reliance. Thrown early on 
our own resources, both as a nation and as individuals, 
we have held fast to the belief that industry brings happi- 
ness, and from first to last, from Franklin to Parkman, it is 
hard to find in our hterature the notes of dread and doubt 
and despair. Third, American hterature has a strong 
tinge of humour. This is, in fact, a continuation of the old 
mood of Steele and Swift and Defoe, and the England 
that laughed with them and was swayed by them, — a 
mood rather serious than merry, striving to recover a 
manly balance of thought and action by contemplating 
typical absurdities of foolishness and prejudice. But it is 
above all the mood of a democracy, in which the citizens 
form together a huge family, undivided save by the sim- 
plest artificial distinctions, and in which, aware of the 
frailty of all, we are quick to catch the ludicrous aspect 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 287 

of life, its incongruities and surprises, the odd simulari- 
ties between things seemingly diverse, the infinite and 
whimsical variations of human nature. 

173. Prose before Irving. — It was in New England, 
where learning was cherished and the life of the spirit 
burned most brightly, that American hterature first found 
voice in the works of Cotton Mather, who was by blood 
and training a fit representative of the New England hier- 
archy, for he came of a family of famous clergymen and 
was himself the most learned and rigorous upholder of 
the early principles of a church state. He is remem- 
bered because of his connection with the Salem witch- 
craft and by two remarkable works, his Wonders of the 
Invisible Wo7/d (16^7,) and his Magnalia Chris ti Ameri- 
cana (1702), the history of Christ's church in America. 
The former is full of vicious superstition, the latter 
crammed with useless learning, but both are thoroughly 
typical. To Cotton Mather the New World was the 
abode of devils, and it was only by fasting and prayer, 
by single-minded devotion to the letter of the stern Puri- 
tan creed, by obedience to the laws of God and the rule 
of his ministers on earth, that the demon-haunted wilder- 
ness could be turned into the saintly paradise for which 
he yearned. The Magnalia Christi Americana is a stout 
folio, written in the quaint style of the seventeenth cen- 
tury divines, at a moment when the almost absolute 
power of the church was weakening. It is memorable 
because it stands as the prose epic of the militant church 
of the first American century, and because it breathes a 



288 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

spirit of noble patriotism, not for a country which had as 
yet no separate existence, but for that high dream of an 
American theocracy which influenced so potently our 
subsequent fortunes. 

Within half a century from the time at which Mather 
wrote, gross superstition had vanished from New Eng- 
land, and the church, separated from the state, had with- 
drawn to its natural functions. But the flame of religious 
feeling burned more fiercely than ever. Jonathan Ed- 
wards believed that men were thronging to hell, where 
they were to be tortured with fire by the divine ven- 
geance, and his powerful sermons, such as Sinners in the 
Hands of an Angij God, give an impressive expression 
to this terrible conviction. Edwards himself was a man 
of pure and exalted character, a Puritan mystic, who de- 
sired a heaven of hohness, and who in his youth spent 
much time, as he wrote, "in viewing the clouds and sky, 
to behold the sweet glory of God in these things ; in the 
meantime singing forth, with a low voice, his contempla- 
tions of the Creator and Redeemer." He was, never- 
theless, the most acute metaphysician of his day, and 
influenced profoundly both American and British philo- 
sophical thought by his Modern Prevailing Nofioizs of 
the Freedom of the Will (1754), written while he was 
living as a missionary among the Stockbridge Indians. 
In a clear, firm style — as different as possible from that 
of Cotton Mather — he endeavoured logically to establish 
the extreme doctrine of foreordination, — that man's 
will is never free, but that, even while seemingly most 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 289 

unfettered in his choice, he is perforce walking in the 
path predestined from all eternity. 

From the sombre fanaticism of Mather and Edwards, 
we turn with delight to the cheery good sense of Benja- 
min Franklin. He was a New Englander also, the son 
of a soap-maker, the descendant of a long Hne of North 
England blacksmiths ; but, by thrift and honest wisdom, 
he came to be one of the great founders of the Republic, 
a distinguished man of science, and a benefactor of the 
people in innumerable ways. He was the incarnation of 
the ^ robust intelligence and inventive and constructive 
genius that accomplished our independence, achieved 
our commercial and industrial prosperity, and has lain at 
the root of our progress in literature and science. Be- 
wildered at finding so strikingly practical a figure in the 
land of Mather and Edwards, critics have sometimes 
declared that Franklin was a typical Englishman of the 
eighteenth century, and that it is, as it were, only by 
accident that he was born and bred on this side of the 
water. But they who speak thus misread the character 
of New England. Since the landing of the Puritans and 
the Pilgrims the writing of books had been the privilege 
of the learned, and the learned wrote of httle else than 
theology. We have only to look below the surface, how- 
ever, to see that the common people were throughout 
this long period of silence slowly developing the Yankee 
traits of mind and temper to which Franklin first gave 
expression in Uterature. 

Franklin was early familiar with Pilgrim's Progress and 
u 



290 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

the Spectator, and he began his literary career by imita- 
tions of the latter. He had caught, however, the essen- 
tial spirit of his models rather than their form, and it 
was the plain speech of Bunyan and the ease of Addison 
which showed themselves most clearly in his important 
works. These consisted chiefly of short articles of many 
kinds, by which he sought with success to influence pub- 
lic opinion on a variety of subjects. Much that he wrote 
is still interesting, but his fame as a man of letters is due 
mainly to his Poor Richard's Almanac (1732-48) and 
his Autobiography. Each year the humble little Almanac 
contained a fresh set of Poor Richard's pithy proverbs, 
in prose or verse, and each year they were pored over, 
not merely by individuals, but by whole households 
throughout the land. The Autobiography, many times 
issued in a garbled form, and printed in full only in 
1868, has likewise been a permanent favourite with the 
people, who read with perennial delight the simple but 
wise tale of the steps by which a humble Yankee boy rose 
to be second only to Washington in the esteem of his 
contemporaries. 

With Franklin in this early period of our literature 
must be mentioned the group of noble men who gave 
their lives to the founding of the state, men who wrote 
well because they had high thoughts and were labouring 
for great ideals. Such were George Washington, the 
dignity of whose state papers are the reflection of his 
own character; Thomas Jefferson, who gave to the 
Declaration of Independence (1775) the sonorous elo- 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 29 1 

quence with which it solemnly calls on God and the 
nations of the world to witness America's proclamation 
of the inahenable rights of her citizens; Alexander 
Hamilton, one of the ablest political thinkers of the 
time and principal author of the remarkable series of 
papers on the theory of government that form the Feder- 
alist (1787-88) ; and Thomas Paine, who was unfor- 
tunately best known by his violent deistical writings, but 
who was the most effective pamphleteer of the Revolution, 
and by his Common Sense {i'j'j6) and T/ie Crisis (1776- 
^3) g^v^ important support to the American cause. 

1 74. Irving and Cooper. — Writing that dealt with 
aught but spiritual truths or plain facts was frowned upon 
in New England, and American imaginative Hterature 
had its birth in the more liberal Middle States. Charles 
Brockden Brown of Philadelphia is said to have been 
the first man of letters in America who supported him- 
self by his pen. His six novels belong to the Enghsh 
school contemporary with him and preceding Scott. 
He delighted in the horrors of death, crime, and pesti- 
lence. But it should be noticed that Brown was the first 
to discover the richness of the field open to American 
writers of fiction, and to substitute, as in Edgar Huntley 
(1801), "the incidents of Indian hostility and the perils 
of the western wilderness " for the puerile terrors of Mrs. 
Radcliffe and the Castle of Otranto. 

It was in the fertile field of native romance that Amer- 
ican literature won its earliest successes, a few years 
later, in the tales of Washington Irving and the novels 



292 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

of James Fenimore Cooper. Irving was by nature akin 
to Addison, Steele, and Goldsmith. He loved their 
kindly, contemplative, whimsical mood, and his work is 
a continuation of theirs without being in any sense an 
imitation of it. Irving first became known through his 
burlesque chronicle of the Dutch New Amsterdam, 
Knickei'bocke}'' s History of New York (1809), a mock- 
heroic parody of a now forgotten volume of local history. 
His Sketch Book (1820), Braced ridge j^<2// (1822), which 
were the first American books read in England, showed, 
at the beginning of his career, the two kinds of material 
of which he was master. In the sketches deahng with an 
English Christmas he continued, so to speak, the Sir 
Roger de Coverley papers, writing from the point of 
view, not of the native Englishman, but of his trans- 
Atlantic cousin ; in the story of Rip Van Winkle he took 
up the legends that clustered around the river of his 
boyhood. In the Tales of a T7'aveller (1824), and in 
other volumes, he continued to treat these two diverse 
subjects, and to them, led by his long residence on the 
continent of Europe and especially in Spain, he added 
the Spanish legend. Irving thus revealed to Americans 
the charm of the Old and — what was of even greater 
service — the charm of the New World. His richest vein 
was that of the romantic tale tinged with humour, and it 
is clear that his temperament, which united a love of 
humour with a love of romance, allowed him to combine 
the best qualities of the eighteenth century essayist with 
those of the story-tellers of his own time. 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 293 

Irving discovered for us the picturesque treasures of 
native scenery and of Dutch colonial life ; Cooper, the 
romance of the virgin wilderness and of the American 
revolution. He was not by instinct a man of letters. 
He had not the breadth and urbanity of nature which 
Irving possessed, and he had not Irving's grace of style. 
But he had the gift of story-telling ; and he was so for- 
tunate as to have seen, in part, a side of American life 
that was of permanent interest to the world, — the titanic 
strife on the westward-moving borders between the pio- 
neer and the Indian. He grew towards middle age with- 
out a thought of authorship, when chance led him to 
novel- writing. The Spy (1821), dealing with the Ameri- 
can Revolution, was followed by a rapid succession of 
remarkable tales of adventure by land and sea. Of these 
the most famous are The Pilot (1823), of which John 
Paul Jones is the hero, and The Last of the Mohicans 
(1826), the best of the Leatherstocking tales. In gen- 
eral, it may be said that Scott was Cooper's model ; but 
Scott merely pointed out the way. Each turned with 
genuine delight to the romance of his own soil. Scott 
wrote of knights and pretenders, of frays and tournaments 
and dungeons ; Cooper, of trappers and braves, of wild 
expeditions, of the scalping-knife and the stake. And 
America and Europe read — and reads — the Waverley 
novels and the Leatherstocking tales with equal joy. 
Cooper's novels of the sea are scarcely less prized, for 
they are the fruit of actual knowledge of nautical affairs ; 
but his greatest contribution to fiction lay in the few great 



294 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAxi 

figures of pioneer life, — Hawkeye, Chingachgook, and 
Uncas, which he created, and which must stand in Hter- 
ature as permanent types. 

175. Poe and Hawthorne. — Edgar Allan Poe and 
Nathaniel Hawthorne had much in common. They 
were as unhke the energetic and resolute Scott and 
Cooper as were Keats and Shelley, and, like the latter, 
they were supersensitive, ethereal, enamoured of the alle- 
gorical and the ideal. 

Poe's physique conditioned his art. His intellect was 
extraordinarily clear and briUiant, delighting in intricate 
problems ; but his nervous system was so morbidly excit- 
able that he was a prey to despair and gloom, and his 
mind was preoccupied by thoughts of death, the grave, 
and all that is ghastly and horrible. From this curious 
conjunction of qualities came the power of his Tales of 
the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and his other sto- 
ries. Sometimes, as in The Gold Bugj Poe applied his 
marvellous skill as an analyst to a mere cryptogram ; 
sometimes, as in the famous Murders in the Rue Morgue, 
to tracing out, with the same inexorable logic, the perpe- 
trator of a crime ; sometimes, as in Hans Pfaal, to the 
construction of a hoax ; but more often, as in Ligeia, The 
Masque of the Red Death, and The Fall of the House of 
Usher, to producing by degrees on the reader the effect 
of utter terror, but terror so refined by the beauty of the 
style as to have become a pleasure. In this strange 
power he has never been surpassed. 

Hawthorne was a New Englander and came of a typi* 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 295 

cal family of Salem sea captains — seafarers from father 
to son, — the descendants of a judge in the Salem witch 
trials. In Hawthorne all the inherited activities were 
turned inwards. Living for years in extreme seclusion in 
the quiet little seaport of Salem, writing by day and walk- 
ing on the beach by night, he brooded over the shapes 
his fancy fashioned, and particularly over the figures from 
the Puritan past that had trodden less than two centuries 
before where his feet then trod. His Twice- Told Tales 
(1837, 1842) and Scarlet Letter (1850) were historical 
romances as much as those of Cooper, but in a different 
sense. Hawthorne's interest lies not in a plot of adven- 
ture but in the analysis of moral impulses, of tempera- 
ment and character, of the essential quahties, indeed, of 
Puritan life. No one portrayed better than he its pictu- 
resque elements, — the little town hemmed in by the 
forest, the quaint garb and speech, the medley of rehg- 
ion and superstition. But it was the Hfe of the spirit 
with which he was preoccupied, and, as in the Marble 
Faun (i860), the tendency is always toward the allegori- 
cal, as if he would say, " Thus lives the soul of man, and 
these are the crises through which it passes, whether to- 
day, or centuries ago, whether in the Old World or the 
New." Hawthorne's mind was not morbid, and his style 
has lurking within it an element of the humorous and the 
grotesque, which tempers the sombreness of the tragic 
and heightens the effect of his quiet mirth, 

176. The Novel after Hawthorne. — Mention must 
also be made of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle 



296 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Tom's Cabin (1852), a novel which has probably had a 
larger circulation than any other book of the century, and 
of which Lincoln said, only half in jest, that it had brought 
about the Civil War. Mrs. Stowe wrote many other books, 
some of which give quaint pictures of rural life in New 
England, but none of them equalled her romance of slav- 
ery, which was translated into many tongues and read 
everywhere by the poor and oppressed, as well as by all 
who sympathised with them. It owed its extraordinary 
power, not to graces of style or peculiar skill in narrative, 
— though the author possessed such skill to a consider- 
able degree, — but to the fact that the subject involved 
was then burning in the hearts of men, and to the fact 
that, as no one had foreseen, the strongest possible argu- 
ments against slavery were not those derived from the 
Constitution or from any theory as to the abstract rights 
of man, but the elemental feelings aroused by this ardess 
tale of a country clergyman's wife, who, busied with her 
housework and her babies, had yet time to brood over 
the wrongs done by law to the helpless and the innocent. 
Poe died in 1849, Cooper in 185 1, Irving in 1859, Haw- 
thorne in 1864. When the Civil War was over and there 
was again a surplus of energy to devote to fiction, the 
last of the earlier generation of story-tellers in America 
had passed away. Slowly there grew up a new genera- 
tion, but it had other subjects and other ways. The 
effect of the war had been to break down in many ways 
the barriers to complete understanding and sympathy 
between different parts of the country, and to allow us to 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 29/ 

form stronger ties of association with other nations. The 
bitter experience of the tragedy of national and individual 
life gained through the great conflict had swept away 
many national and local absurdities, and brought us into 
the full current of modern thought and feeling. The 
results of this clarifying process were two : we gained 
interest in ourselves, and we were in a position to appre- 
ciate the contemporary movements of European thought. 
Up to 1870 no one had written well of modern American 
life. Cooper had confined himself largely to colonial 
and revolutionary times, Hawthorne and Poe lived in a 
world of dreams. But from the Luck of Roariftg Ca77ip 
(1870) in which Francis Bret Harte depicted, some- 
what after the manner of Dickens, the rough but sterling 
characters of the extreme West, to the end of the cen- 
tury, the trend of fiction was towards the portrayal of 
characters distinctive of special parts of the country, 
scarcely any section of which is not now well represented 
in current Hterature. Though romance has happily not 
died out from American life or American fiction, there 
has also been a strong trend towards realism in fiction, the 
leaders in this movement, William Dean Howells and 
Henry James, following, with important variations, the 
general method of the strong European school, from 
which England has to a great degree held herself aloof 
(page 265). It is also interesting to notice the promi- 
nent part played in the hterature of this period by the 
short story, which, from Poe and Hawthorne on, has been 
a favourite with American authors, and which has proved 



2gS ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

an excellent vehicle for the studies of local character, 
towards which, as has just been said, prose fiction so 
strongly tended. 

177. Statesmen. — A democratic government is by 
nature proHfic in political orators, who arouse the people 
to the appreciation of whatever is essential in matters 
under public discussion, and who, addressing large and 
representative audiences, and taking for their themes 
national issues, are themselves incited to their fullest 
powers by the magnitude of the interests involved, and 
the fact that they stand face to face with those to whom 
they appeal, and do not address the impersonal reader 
through the medium of the printed page. In the United 
States, the period between the War of 18 12 and the Civil 
War was especially rich in such orators, particularly in 
the Senate, where for forty years debate centred on the 
most vital questions, affecting the unity and welfare of 
the young repubhc. Of these statesmen the greatest was 
Daniel Webster, whose penetrating intellect, magnificent 
voice, grand presence, sincere devotion to the cause of 
national unity, and extraordinary power of marshalling 
facts and principles so as to produce conviction, have 
caused him to be ranked among the great orators of the 
world, and made him one of the strongest forces in that 
slow process by which the inhabitants of many federated 
states came to feel themselves one nation. 

The work of Abraham Lincoln began as that of Web- 
ster closed, and it has become plain that the work of both 
was part of the same great task of awakening a nation. 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 299 

Great minds, like those of Hamilton and Webster, had 
long held forth the idea of complete national unity. With 
Hamilton the idea was a political abstraction. Webster 
was the voice that taught the concept to the people. Lin- 
coln, born of the very heart of the people, self-taught, and 
growing spontaneously towards the right, was the token 
that the mass of the people had unconsciously made that 
concept their own, and became the great instrument by 
which that concept became realised. A less powerful 
orator than Webster, who spoke after the fashion of 
Demosthenes and Cicero, he uttered his plain thoughts 
only in the homely speech of the people. Not much of 
what he said and wrote belongs to literature, but those 
few words, as in the Address at Gettysburg (1863) and 
the Second Inaugural Address (1865), sank into the 
hearts of men, for he spoke in the name of the nation 
and as its good genius. 

178. Historians. — The first American historian who 
was also a man of letters was undoubtedly Cotton Mather, 
whose conception of the Magnalia Christi Americana 
was that it should record all that was essential in the 
history of the church, which was to him what our country 
is to us. But it was destined that more than a century 
and a half should pass before a writer of equal power 
should attempt to deal with any important part of our 
history. We may except Irving's biographies of Colum- 
bus and Washington, works of solid merit, whose real 
value has been obscured by their author's reputation as 
a writer of stories. But Irving was not a historian of the 



300 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

first rank, and William Hickling Prescott and John 
LoTHROP Motley, who were, chose foreign themes. 
Prescott was fascinated by the romance of Spanish dis- 
covery. His Conquest of Mexico (1843) and Conquest 
of Peru (1847) were the result of elaborate and pains- 
taking reS"earch, a task made more onerous by the fact 
that he was nearly blindo The entrancing theme and his 
firm but somewhat cold style made his works widely read, 
and it is to be regretted that the science of archaeology 
was then so little advanced as to allow him to form an 
altogether false conception of the primitive people of 
whom he wrote. Motley, equally attracted by Spanish 
history, chose for a theme the struggle with the Nether- 
lands and the establishment there of a democratic gov- 
ernment, — a subject which he investigated with equal 
thoroughness, and treated, in his Rise of the Dutch Re- 
public (1856) and History of the United Netherlands 
(1861-68), in a noble and impassioned style, and with 
sympathy for the cause of political and religious freedom. 
Francis Parkman, superior to both as a historian and a 
man of letters, chose the struggle between France and 
England for supremacy in the New World, — an epic 
theme, which, though partly disabled by ill health, he 
treated in full in a series of works, beginning with the 
Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851) and closing with A Half- 
Century of Conflict (1892). Parkman's mastery of his 
subject was complete, and his style, — clear, pure, supple, 
and brilliant, — though less sonorous than that of Gibbon, 
has not been surpassed by that of any historian. The 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 3OI 

history of the United States has been attempted, in 
whole or in part, by many excellent writers, among whom 
should be mentioned George BANCROFr, and has been 
made the subject of much detailed research, but no one 
has yet treated it in such a fashion that his work has 
become literature. 

179. The New England Group of Essayists. — As we 
have said, it was in New England that the life of the in- 
tellect and of the spirit was the most intense in the seven- 
teenth and the eighteenth centuries. The same statement 
holds true of the nineteenth century, up to, at least, the 
time of the Civil War. The Puritan inheritance was a 
remarkable one. On generation after generation it had 
impressed the immense importance of the soul and its 
relation to a personal God, thereby awakening to an ex- 
traordinary degree the consciousness of the individual. 
It had, moreover, kept the eyes of man open to the mys- 
terious side of existence, teaching him to watch for mani- 
festations of God and the devil. On the other hand, the 
narrowness and bigotry of the sect had sealed all the 
aesthetic senses of man, forcing him to fix his attention 
alone upon his own sins and the just anger of an avenging 
God, and rendering greater his torments on earth by 
teaching, expHcitly or implicitly, that his doom or his 
pardon had been predestined from all eternity. As time 
passed by, this grim conception of Hfe became modified. 
The New England colleges had gone steadily on with 
their work of education. More important still, the com- 
mon sense of the people awoke, touching life with humoui 



302 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 

and sagacity. Beginning in the early years of ttie nine- 
teenth century, there arose what might be called a human- 
istic or humanitarian movement, both within and without 
the church, which insisted less on man's innate moral de- 
pravity and more on his power, in many ways, to lay him- 
self open to spiritual influences, and by high resolve and 
earnest effort to make himself and the world better. 
Cutting itself adrift from the church sometimes, the move- 
ment showed itself in strange and transient sects and in 
wild schemes for the better organization of society, and 
produced swarms of fanatic reformers. It was also closely 
associated with pohtical and Hterary movements. It was 
the mother of abolitionism, and it led directly to the tran- 
cendental theories that were the basis of Emerson's phil- 
osophy. Slowly the reticent New England mind, so cold 
and grim, so closed to aught but God, opened also to 
man, and the result was, for half a century, an outpouring 
of the heart in prose and song that constitutes the major 
part of American literature. Of the writers we have 
mentioned, Webster, Hawthorne, Prescott, Motley, and 
Parkman were New Englanders, and of those whom we 
have still to mention, Emerson, Thoreau, Holmes, Lowell, 
Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier. Most of them, too, 
came of Massachusetts stock, and are associated with the 
north-eastern part of that state, where the Puritan civi- 
hsation put out its deepest roots, and where the humani- 
tarian movement found its chief seat. 

The humanitarian movement may then be in general 
defined as an awakening to a sense of human relations. 



H PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 303 

In this literary and philosophical movement the chief 
figure for many years was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who 
combined the two strains of New England thought repre- 
sented by Cotton Mather and by Franklin. For two 
centuries one group of minds had been mystics, and 
another the incarnation of common sense ; one stood for 
the priesthood, the other for the people. Emerson's 
fathers had long been clergymen, and he began his career 
by preaching. His mind instinctively turned to the un- 
seen. His philosophy, best expressed perhaps in Nature 
(1836), was that of the German idealists, — that all vis- 
ible is but a form of the spirit, a manifestation of God ; 
that man himself is another division of that same spirit, 
having knowledge of God, its source, through innate ideas. 
But though his thought ran at times to the extreme of 
mysticism, it had that singular characteristic which we 
find in Franklin and in Lincoln, and which makes us feel 
them American. He loved simple things and ways and 
people. He saw into the hearts of men with eyes not 
distorted by erudition or dogma, and read there the es- 
sential elements of human action. More like Montaigne 
than any other European author, he loved to be the voice 
of wisdom and to utter in the homehest manner the most 
vital truths. He lectured much and wrote much, in- 
fluencing men strongly in both ways. His Essays (1841, 
1844), Representative Men (1850), and Conduct of Life 
(i860), were great forces in awakening the people, for, 
whatever subject he treated, he preached freedom oi 
thought, nobiHty of mind, and high resolution. 



304 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

Henry David Thoreau, Emerson's friend and fellow- 
townsman, published only two books during his lifetime, 
A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1848), 
and Walden^ or Life in the Woods (1854), though since 
his death several other volumes have been compiled from 
his papers. Thoreau was a man of education, but he 
preferred to support himself by the work of his own 
hands. He was an expert pencil-maker, an excellent 
surveyor, and by the intermittent exercise of these em- 
ployments, as well as by farm labour, he earned enough for 
his simple needs. Much of his time was spent in the open 
air, either in the woods and fields about his native place, 
or in occasional longer journeys through New England. 
His ruling passions were his deep and constant delight 
in nature and his love of simplicity and independence. 
Both passions were most completely and naturally grati- 
fied when he passed more than two years in a little hut 
which he built by Walden pond near Concord, tilling a 
small plot of ground, and depending for sustenance and 
for enjoyment almost entirely on his own resources. His 
books are the reflection of a singularly quiet and beautiful 
character, self-poised and self- controlled like that of a 
stoic, but full of a sympathy with nature that became at 
times almost mystic. No one has known nature in New 
England better than he, or approached him in the 
description of it, or given better expression to the type 
of New England feeling that finds content and high 
thoughts in a quiet and simple country life. 

Few contrasts can be greater than that between Emer- 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 305 

son and Thoreau, with their gentle and thoughtful country 
ways, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, long professor of 
anatomy at the Harvard Medical School in Boston. 
Holmes said jestingly of his city that it was the hub of the 
solar universe, but it is plain that in his heart he felt this 
to be true, for neither his subjects nor his sympathies 
often allow him to stray far beyond the city borders. 
His genius had in it no touch of the mystic ; he was not 
greatly impressed by nature; he did not love soHtude; 
his social and professional connections held him aloof 
from the common folk ; he was essentially an aristocrat. 
But his intellect, if little touched by the imagination, was 
keen, and his wit brilliant ; and he was a shrewd observer 
of human nature. Of his verse we shall speak later ; it 
was by his prose that he caught the ear of the people. 
In the first volume of the Atlantic Monthly, destined to 
contain for a period so much of the best in American 
Hterature, appeared his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table 
(1858), and this was followed by The Professor at the 
Breakfast Table (i860), and The Poet at the Breakfast 
Table (1872). They are essay-novels, and begin quite 
after the fashion of Tristram Shandy. The novel ele- 
ment, though slight, is worth taking account of, in that it 
is so complete a foil to the work of Hawthorne. Holmes 
takes the types of a Boston boarding-house as his charac- 
ters. He throws no veil of glamour over them, as Haw- 
thorne would have done, but judges them as a physician 
might, with an accurate knowledge of their physical and 
mental pecuHarities. The shrewd estimates of people, 

X 



306 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the pretty little romances he imagines about them — as 
a man might imagine such things for his own amusement 
— pleased everyone ; and everyone was also pleased by 
the essay elements, the wise and witty opinions of men 
and things, the humour, the pathos, the fashion all his 
own, in which, as it were, he turned inside out the gar- 
ment of Hfe, allowing men to smile at the oddities re- 
vealed, but showing them also, by this whimsical method, 
something more of its true shape than they would other- 
wise have known. 

Most of the writers whom we have mentioned in this 
chapter were graduated from Harvard College, which in 
the first half of the century performed a unique service 
in firing the ambition of young men in letters at the same 
time that she trained their judgment and moulded their 
taste. George Ticknor, the historian of Spanish Htera- 
ture, held the famous professorship of belles-lettres from 
1820 to 1835, and was succeeded by Longfellow, and he 
in his turn, in 1855, by James Russell Lowell, who, like 
his predecessor, was already a poet, and who was also to 
become the first critic in the land. Lowell had many 
accomplishments. He had a wide knowledge of the 
romance languages and Hteratures, and of English prose 
and poetry. He was for years editor of the Atlantic 
Monthly and of the North American Review^ and he 
served as ambassador both to Spain and to England. 
But his most conspicuous service to his country and to 
literature were his critical essays, which deal almost 
invariably with great literature and are the fruit of long 



XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 307 

reading and study. Lowell had a genius for criticism. 
His style was rich and buoyant, abounding in happy 
fancies and striking turns of expression. Less dogmatic 
than Arnold, and less occupied with the foundation of a 
critical method, he wrote with more enthusiasm as well 
as with greater knowledge. With all his interest in 
foreign literature, a sound knowledge of which he did 
much to make possible in America, he was a lover of his 
own country and our own letters. He was of the stock 
that made New England, and he never lost his deep 
affection for her peculiar characteristics, her idiosyncra- 
sies of language and temper, and the great principles 
which she has done so much to establish in American 
life. 

The chapter would be incomplete were we to omit 
mention of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, — better known 
under his pseudonym, Mark Twain, whose works have 
perhaps been more widely read than those of any other 
English author of this century. He may be classed as a 
novelist. Huckleberry Finn (1884) and its sequels, as 
well as other stories, are, apart from their ludicrous side, 
of great value as fiction, for they portray with great 
vividness and accuracy phases of American life before 
the Civil War, particularly in the Mississippi valley. 
But his wide fame is chiefly due to his Innocents 
Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and A Tramp 
Abroad (1880), which not only provoked hearty laugh- 
ter but served also to mould the thought of the 
nation. Beneath all his extravagance and whimsicality 



308 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

of statement, beneath apparent irreverence and (some- 
times) even coarseness, there lurks a serious and a high 
motive. Mark Twain, Hke Frankhn and Lincoln, came 
of the people, and he represents, in much the same way 
that Lincoln did, the mass of the people, — their native 
ideals, their real temper, their impatience of mere learn- 
ing and mere convention and mere fancy. And so his 
own laughter was echoed by theirs whenever he touched 
on vital questions of character and conduct, showing, for 
example, as he did in Innocents Abroad, the foolishness 
of that form of European travel that cultivates affectation, 
mock appreciation, and the worship of the mere acci- 
dents of antiquity, which civilisation has long justly 
discarded. A deadly foe of sham and cant in all their 
forms, strong in his sanity and in his reliance upon the 
behefs and principles of the people, he has been as 
brave a soldier for the cause of humanity as was Heine. 



XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 309 



CHAPTER XII 

POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 

180. Prose rather than poetry has been the natural 
form of expression in American literature, — a form 
wholly consonant with our national mood, that of clear- 
headed, well-ordered aspiration. The part of literature 
which we call poetry is great in importance, but very 
limited in its field. Only ideas of certain sorts can be 
expressed by it. Its production is dependent, to a large 
degree, on a state of society in which an author is free to 
live a life of resolute leisure like that of Tennyson or 
Shelley, free from all that would divert his fancy or his 
imagination from communion with his dreamlike ideals. 
Such opportunities the American social system rarely fur- 
nishes. Our thoughts have been of necessity immediately 
concerned with the present, — with what has been done, 
with what must now be done. Prose is, therefore, our 
characteristic language, — the language of debate, and 
discussion, and explanation, the language of the orator, 
the statesman, the historian, the critic, the novelist. 

It must not be forgotten, however, that there are three 
elements in American hfe that have had a great influence 



3IO ENGLISH LITERATURE eHAP. 

in moulding the national character, and which have, to 
some degree, given to our poetry traits peculiarly Ameri- 
can. These are, first, the influence of American scenery, 
so wild, so dominating, so long free from the touch of 
man ; second, the rehgious influence of the forms of 
dissenting Christianity most wide-spread among us, all 
of which have tended to awaken an intense interest in 
the inner life, the life of the soul, with its subtle hopes 
and fears, with its tenderness of conscience, its sympathy 
with human frailty, its reliance on the unseen ; third, the 
pervading influence of a well-assimilated democracy, in 
which there was long Httle difference in comfort, edu- 
cation, and refinement between the rich and the poor, 
the great and the humble, and where each individual 
and each household knew the joys of homely living. 
These elements the attentive student will find running 
throughout American verse. Unlike the prose of our 
century, it has not been in volume and value com- 
parable with that produced by some other great nations, 
and particularly by England, but it has yet had its 
modest glories. 

i8i. Early American Verse. — There is little early 
American verse worth mentioning. Between the landing 
of the Pilgrims and Bryant's Thanatopsis (1817) there 
had passed two centuries in which no melodious voice 
was heard. Rehgion had stifled poetry ; the trend of life 
had been away from it. If we had been a primitive race 
we might have had our epics and ballads ; but we were 
100 old for these, and too young, too distracted by toil, 



XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 3 II 

to sing in a new fashion of a new life. What verse there 
was followed European models, — feeble imitations, in 
the seventeenth century, of Donne and Quarles and Du 
Bartas ; and, in the eighteenth, of Butler and Pope. The 
first sign of quickening spirit was the swarm of pohtical 
and satirical ballads in Revolutionary times, of which 
survives only the rollicking tune and bantering words of 
Yankee Doodle. After the estabHshment of the Repub- 
lic, we have, in addition, a few poems endeared to us by 
tradition as the first Kspings of patriotic verse, Hail Co- 
lumbia (1798) and the Star Spangled Banner (18 14). 
Then came more ambitious, but still artless attempts to 
sing of New World stuff, such as those made by Philip 
Freneau, who, before Cooper, saw the romance of the 
Indian, of whom his fathers had thought only as a danger- 
ous beast ; or by Joseph Rodman Drake, who wrote the 
American Flag, the best piece of patriotic verse in the 
early century, and the Culprit Fay (1835), i^ which 
the birds and beasts and flowers of our own land begin 
to appear in our poetry ; or by his friend, Fitz-Greene 
Halleck, who wrote so tenderly of his death. Nor 
must we omit mention of John Howard Payne, whose 
HomCf Sweet Home (1823) touched deeply the hearts 
of a land where men migrate so freely. 

i8i«. Bryant. — American poetry, however, begins 
with William Cullen Bryant. Born in 1794, in the Berk- 
shire highlands, he shared as a boy in the austere life of 
early New England, where, though few knew want, every 
farmer's boy was hardened to fatigue and cold, and 



312 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

taught Stern lessons of frugality by tasks that bred reso- 
luteness and self-control. The terrors of inexorable fore- 
ordination and punishment were ceasing somewhat to 
haunt men's minds, but there was little innocent mirth and 
spontaneous joy. Life was work, and work against odds. 
Bryant spent the years of his manhood in New York, 
where he became a distinguished journalist, but his best 
verse, Thanatopsis, To a Water-Foivl, The Death of the 
FlowerSf was either written in his boyhood or is wholly 
removed in spirit from his later urban Hfe. It breathes a 
high spirit of austerity and stoic resignation, and is the 
song of men who, escaped from the haunting terrors of 
superstition, look anew on nature, and see in it only what 
is cold and dark and silent — the stern, unsetting stars, 
the silent beauty of the wilderness, the desolate sea, but 
are still " sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust." 
182. Longfellow and Whittier. — The best-known 
name in American poetry is that of Henry Wadsworth 
Longfellow, whose first experiments in verse were pub- 
lished as early as 1826. His ambition from boyhood 
was to enter the then entirely unprofitable field of litera- 
ture, but his interests were fortunately in part those of 
the student and teacher. His work as instructor in mod- 
ern languages at Bowdoin College attracted attention, and 
after several years of study and travel abroad he suc- 
ceeded George Ticknor in the now famous professorship 
of belles-lettres at Harvard College. Longfellow's work 
as a teacher was of great service to the cause of letters in 
America, for no one in his time did more to diffuse the 



Xll POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 313 

knowledge and appreciation of what was best in European 
literature. As a poet, a part of his influence lay along 
the same lines. He translated much foreign verse, 
always with grace and fidelity, setting the seal on his 
labours by his memorable rendering of the Divine Comedy 
(1867). But his influence was greater than that of a 
translator. The Golden Legend {iZc^i) and almost num- 
berless minor pieces, bred of his own fancy or based on 
foreign originals, reproduced the inner spirit of mediaeval 
times, — at least on its gentler side, — the glamour and 
romance alike of southern climes and of the north. 
A close student of European literature and sensitive 
to literary movements, he conceived in his apprentice 
days the idea of creating new forms in American 
literature, by applying to native material the methods 
already common elsewhere. The idea was a natural 
one and the execution was admirable. His two early 
attempts at native ballads. The Skeleton in Armor and 
The Wreck of the Hesperus, were entirely successful, 
and his later attempts at the pastoral and the epic — 
Evangeline (1847), after the manner of Goethe's Her- 
mann and Dorothea, and Hiawatha (1855), in the 
metre of the Finnish Kalevala, — were not only im- 
mensely popular, serving their purpose in awakening the 
country to the romance of its own soil, but must remain 
permanent monuments of our literature. Though Long- 
fellow was a master pioneer in this way, he was most 
ioved by the people for the gentle moralising of his verse. 
A kindly man, devoted to his work and to his family and 



314 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

friends, he cared little for the great contemporary move- 
ments in thought and politics. He loved the outward 
aspects of nature, without passion or mysticism, and drew 
from them, with the quaintness of the early German 
romanticists, little lessons, as in The Rainy Day. He 
was not a great thinker, and his work, hke his hfe, held 
aloof from great or intricate problems ; but he sang 
sweetly and gently, his heart was pure, his sympathy 
strong, and he hved a simple Hfe. He was the first to 
reveal to us the magic of foreign poetry and to show us 
that American subjects had as much romance as those 
of Europe. He appealed to the young and old, to men 
and women, and he was the greatest household poet of 
the century. 

An almost exact contemporary of Longfellow was John 
Greenleaf Whittier, born in 1807, in Haverhill, Massa- 
chusetts, of a family that had been permanently settled 
in that vicinity since the early days of the seventeenth 
century. His early hfe was that of the ordinary farmer's 
lad, full of labour and hardship, and free from affectation. 
His formal education was slight, but he knew men and 
good books, and his skill as a rhymster and his interest 
in pubhc affairs led him into journalism and politics. By 
1832 he had won a name for himself in both fields, and 
seemed likely to represent his district in Congress, but 
his delicate health forced him to give up his ambitions in 
either direction, and he retired to his native county, where 
he spent, with slight exceptions, the remainder of his 
long life. Whittier was first known by his political verse. 



XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 3I5 

A Quaker, with the spirit of a reformer, he early joined 
the anti-slavery party, and became one of the leading 
abolitionists, and certainly the great poet of the move- 
ment. His verses were efficacious in moulding the 
opinions of all ranks of society in the North and West, 
from the President and his Cabinet to the lowest soldier 
or tax-payer; but they were instruments in a transient 
struggle, the product of discord and sectional feehng, and 
cannot perhaps be expected to remain permanently in 
the national memory. 

Whittier's religious verse is much more national in 
character. His Quaker tolerance, his hfe of moral ear- 
nestness, his gentle, unspotted character, and his simple 
way of taking the world, made him a fitting spokesman 
in verse of the more liberal religious feeling of the day. 
It is, however, by his verses on country life, as in Sitow- 
B ound {i?>66) and The Teuton the Beach (1867), rather 
than by his poUtical or religious poetry, that Whittier will 
be remembered. A bachelor and an invaUd, not bound 
by the ties that commonly blind men to wider thoughts 
than society and ambition, following pursuits that gave 
ample leisure for meditation, he lived, with Quaker and 
Puritan frugahty, a hfe full of reminiscence of boyhood 
days and of the country ways that had never ceased to be 
his. And this reminiscence and this sympathy became 
the voice of a whole multitude. East and West, that still 
toiled in the fields, or turned gladly back in spirit from 
city counting-houses to the orchards and brooks of their 
early years. Without Longfellow's learning and cultiva- 



3l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAi- 

rion, he rivalled him too on his own field, reviving inci- 
dents ot early New England life after a less bookish 
fashion, and one truer alike to the facts and to the temper 
of the time, in ballads that are among the best in modern 
Enghsh literature. 

183. Emerson, Holmes, and Lowell. — ^ Longfellow was 
closely connected with the group of New England prose- 
writers described in the preceding chapter; Whittier, 
owing to his country life and retiring habits, stood some- 
what outside of it. Hawthorne and Thoreau were not 
poets ; but Emerson, Holmes, and Lowell, the three 
remaining figures in what might be called the Boston or 
Cambridge school, were poets as well as prose-writers, 
though their fame in the former field is not so great as 
in the latter. 

In prose, Emerson's glory was that by his noble phi- 
losophy he thrilled the young and earnest with the desire 
to live lives self-controlled, self-reliant, hopeful, simple; 
and his voice was the first in America to rouse such 
enthusiasm in the hearts of the aspiring, and to teach 
such noble lessons. In verse Emerson's influence was 
not different, Indeed, poetry and prose seemed to him 
closely akin. His imagination once kindled and finding 
vent in words, it was merely a matter of throwing them 
into groups of one kind or another, or of so altering them 
at times that they fell into a simple rhythm or made 
simple rhymes or assonances. His ear was not keen in 
either respect, and it is said that at times he scarcely 
knew whether what he had written was prose or verse. 



XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 317 

Yet such was the naked power of his imagination that, as 
in the case of the Hebrew poets, we find a simple art the 
fitting medium for thoughts of singular simplicity and 
remarkable power. The thought of the essays is in large 
measure that of the poems, which are mainly gnomic or 
didactic, the sage's aphorisms, pregnant with deep sug- 
gestion, as in his mystical and beautiful Brahma, Some- 
times, however, he undertook historical subjects, as in 
the famous Concord Hymn, or was moved to give utter- 
ance to the emotion caused by his own personal experi- 
ence, as in the most touching of his poems, // is Time ta 
Be Old and the Threnody. But his best-known work 
has perhaps been his nature poems, — The Numble-Bee^ 
Monadnock, and The Snow-storm, — where his art is 
more like that of Whittier, and stamps them both as men 
who had seen nature face to face, with the eyes of simple 
humanity, and not through library windows. 

Holmes was the city member of the little group, and 
his verse has the urban qualities that remind us of Pope 
and Queen Anne's London. He was only about twenty 
when his spirited lines on the proposed destruction of the 
old frigate Constitution (1830) were on everyone's hps. 
His first volume of poems (1836) showed the quali- 
ties that remained his throughout Hfe. He had the gift 
of broad and farcical humour, the more delicate art of wit, 
and a vein of genuine pathos and serious thought, — the 
last at its best in the Last Leaf and the Chambered Nau- 
tilus. But it was wit, — the pun, the sparkhng jest, the 
neatly turned and salient thought, — that made hirn th^ 



3l8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAt. 

favourite poet at public or private gatherings in his native 
state j and though little of his verse on trivial topics and 
occasions now no longer memorable can ultimately sur- 
vive, it is astonishing how much of it retains its interest. 
He was less an imitator of Pope than a belated member 
of Pope's own school, with equal v/it and skill in epigram, 
and a power over Pope's favourite metre that has not 
been equalled except by Pope. 

Like Holmes, Lowell was a wit, and it was by clever 
satire and humorous criticism that he first won favour in 
his Biglow Papers (1848 and 1867) and his Fable for 
Critics (1848). He differs from Holmes, however, in 
that his talent is that of the brilliant improvisatore rather 
than that of the somewhat mechanical artist, and that he 
dealt with larger subjects. Holmes had an eighteenth 
century heart, tolerant and kindly, but at bottom coldly 
observant of human nature and incapable of devotion to 
a cause. Lowell was made in a later and larger mould. 
His heart was set on the welfare of his country, and so, 
scholar and Yankee that he was, he gave his political satire 
the flavour of rustic speech and jest, as only one could 
do who was learned in antiquarian lore and bred in the 
stronghold of the New England spirit. His best serious 
verse was The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848), a mediaeval 
tale, in the manner of Longfellow, with a prelude and 
interlude which are accurately descriptive of nature in 
New England, and the noble Commemoration Ode ( 1865) . 

184. Foe. — We now leave the New England school 
of poets, passing to Poe, who was the only writer outside 



XIl POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 319 

of New England who was contemporary with them, and 
to later poets. Poe published thin volumes in 1827, 1829, 
and 1 83 1, containing, at least in germ, many of his best 
poems ; and his last volume of collected verse appeared 
in 1845. It must therefore be kept in mind that he wrote 
before any of the preceding writers, except Bryant, had 
done work that would justify their present reputation. 
Poe had closer affinities with Coleridge, Shelley, and 
Keats than had any other American poet, and is our soli- 
tary figure on that side of the romantic school. He ab- 
horred didacticism in verse, and loved the form of poetry 
which by rhythm and melody appeals exclusively to the 
imagination. What he wrote was short, exquisite in form, 
and ethereal in matter, the artistic expression of moods 
that are aUied to madness, — moods in which death con- 
quers all, and ghosts and demons and evil harbingers are 
on every hand. This unreal world he sung in a melody 
more piercingly sweet, more haunting, more mystically 
sad and terrible than that of any other American poet, 
and the peculiarities of his genius and of his art have 
caused him rightly to be hailed, in his Hmited field of 
pure fancy, as the greatest that has arisen among us. 

185. Whitman and Later Poets. — Emerson had de- 
clared that men must look into their own hearts and on 
nature for inspiration and solace, and that Americans 
must find the stimulus for their own literature in their 
own national and personal experiences. As if in response 
to his call and his example, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and 
Whittier were doing, in the sixth decade of the century, 



320 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAt. 

their most characteristic work ; and in the same decade 
appeared a thin volume entitled Leaves of Grass (1855), 
by Walt Whitman^ This, with succeeding productions 
of the same character, have been much read, and, espe- 
cially in Europe, have been thought typical of the ideas 
of a great democracy. Whitman's manner was that of 
the rhapsodist, who, deeply moved and despising con- 
vention, uttered his thought in language depending largely 
for its effect on its irregular rhythm, usually without the 
aid of rhyme. Like Whittier, and with him almost alone 
among our poets. Whitman knew the life of the people. 
But it was the old New England farming folk with which 
Whittier was famihar. Whitman knew the humbler city 
folk, — firemen and drivers and mechanics, more typical 
even than farmers of the men whose political judgment or 
caprice determines the destinies of our municipahties or 
the nation. These men, as symbols of democracy, he 
idolised, seeing in them the nobihty of active and healthy 
life. He felt himself their brother, the type of the race. 
He sang of them, of his joy in comradeship with them, of 
their wondrous diversity of toil, of a commonwealth based 
on honest living and plain thinking, of the joy of mere 
physical existence, of the great panorama of nature spread 
before us, of national ideals, of our heroes. His song 
was full of uncouth words and rough thoughts, and not 
free from affectation, and the people of whom he wrote 
have not understood him ; but others have, and the 
grandeur of his conception and the majestic sweep of 
his verse entitle him to a place among our poets. 



jQl POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 521 

Poe died young, in 1849, but the other poets mentioned 
in this chapter lived singularly long and happy lives. 
Even the venerable Bryant lived until 1878; Longfellow 
and Emerson, until 1882 ; Lowell, until 1891 ; Whittier 
and Whitman, until 1892 ; and Holmes, until 1894. The 
men who began American poetry have, then, survived 
almost until the end of the century. Of these men, the 
New England poets formed a group by themselves, whose 
tendencies and habits of thought give our verse its chief 
characteristics, namely, simpHcity and a love for the di- 
dactic. In the first respect they differ greatly from the 
contemporary Enghsh school, who, from Keats to Ten- 
nyson, have depended to a large degree on the exquisite 
finish which they gave to their verse. In the second 
respect, the American school followed the lead of Words- 
worth. 

Whitman may, on the whole, be regarded as a member 
of the New England school in spirit, and as merely push- 
ing to an extreme the methods of Emerson and Thoreau, 
though it must be confessed that it is easier to put him 
in a class by himself. At all events, he has had no 
prominent disciples, and his influence, wherever felt, has 
served merely to add to the simplicity of our verse and 
its disregard of the more intricate conventions of form. 
Poe's influence, on the contrary, has led towards greater 
care for form and interest in the craftsman's side of 
poetry. The influence of the school of the Pre-Raphael- 
ites, which would have worked in the same direction, has 
scarcely been felt in America Since the Civil War onijf 

Y 



322 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Xll 

two tendencies have been distinguishable in our poetry, 
The first is parallel to the tendency noted in the novel 
and short story (see page 297), namely, towards verse 
dealing with the humours and peculiarities of life in 
certain localities, usually in dialect, the best example of 
which is perhaps to be found in the poems of Bret 
Harte. The other is that towards craftsmanship, best 
shown in the verse of Sidney Lanier, poet and musician, 
the intricate melody and charm of whose lyrics and 
odes make him the only other poet of the century whom 
it would be appropriate to mention here. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



A.D. 

449- « 

597- • 
627 . . 
635, et seq 
664. . 
670-80 
669-71 
68o?-709 
690 (cir.) 
674-82 

673- • 
731 . . 
735 • • 

766-82 

782-92 
793. • 



800 . 
830. 






English History begins in Britain. The Jutes land 
in Thanet. 

Christianity brought into England by Augustine; 

And into Northumbria by Paulinus. 

The Celtic Missionaries evangelise Northumbria. 

The Synod of Whitby. 

The poems of Caedmon. 

School of Canterbury; Archbishop Theodore. 

The literary work of Ealdhelm. (Born 656.) 

The laws of Ine. 

Wearmouth, Jarrow, and their libraries, founded by 
Benedict Biscop. 

Bseda, Benedict's scholar, born. 

Baeda's Ecclesiastical History. (Death of Baeda, 735) 

Ecgberht, Archbp. of York, establishes the School 
of York and the Library. (Died 766.) 

^thelbert and Alcuin make York the centre of 
European learning. 

Alcuin carries the learning of York to Europe. 

The first Viking raid on Northumbria. 

Cynewulf (born about 720) wrote his poems prob- 
ably in the latter half of this century. 

Charles the Great crowned emperor. 

About this date the " Heliand," an Old Saxon 
poem, was written. 

323 



324 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



AD. 
867-76 . 


871. . . 

886 (cir.) 


901 . . . 
913. . . 

937 • • • 
961-88 . 
964, et seq. 


971 .. . 

991 . . . 
991-96 . 


1031 . . 
1042-65 . 



1066 

1066 
1070 



I07I 

1085 
J087 
1093 
1095 

JJOO 

1 109 



The final destruction of the seats of learning in 
Northumbria by " the Army." 

The accession of yElfred. 

Alfred begins his Hterary work. The English 
Chronicle is first carefully edited in this reign. 

Death of Alfred. 

Rolf settles in Normandy. 

Song of Battle of Brunanburh, in the Chronicle. 

Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. 

King Eadgar, with ^thelwold and Oswald, Bishops 
of Winchester and Worcester, revives English 
monachism in Wessex and East Anglia. 

Blickling Homilies. 

Song of the Battle of Maldon. 

^Ifric's Homilies; after 1005, his Treatise on the 
Old and New Testament. (Died 1020-25.) 

Swegen of Denmark becomes King of England. 

Reign of Edward the Confessor. England's first 
contact with French Romance. 

Latin translation of a late Greek Romance, Apol- 
lonius of Tyre, and of two small books belonging 
to the Alexander Saga. 

The Lay of Roland is brought to England. 

IVilliam I. 

Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury. 

The " Charlemagne," Norman poem, before the end 
of the nth century. 

The Exeter Book given by Leofric, Bishop of Exe- 
ter, to his Cathedral. 

The Domesday Book. 

Williai7i II. crowned by Lanfranc. 

Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. 

The beginning of the Crusades. The stories of the 
East soon come to the West. 

Henry I. 

University of Paris rises into importance with Wil- 
liam of Champeaux and Peter Abelard. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



325 



A.D. 

IIIO . 

III8 . 

1 1 20 . 

1126-43 
I 1 29 . 

"35-54 
1135 . 
1132-35 

"54 . 



1154 . 
"55 • 

1 160 . 
1156-59? 
1160-70 
(cir.) 

1160-70 . 
1 1 70 . . 
1 1 70-90 . 

1 1 80-90 ? . 



ii8g 
1198 



Miracle play of St. Catherine. 

End of Florence of Worcester's Chronicle. 

End of William of Malmesbury's Historia regum 
Anglorum. 

William of Malmesbury's Historiae novellae. 

End of Simeon of Durham's Chronicle. 

Henry of Huntingdon's History of England. 

Stephen. 

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Britonum. Final 
form, 1 147. 

English Chronicle ends. 

Gesta Stephani. Hexham Chroniclers. 

At the end of reign of Henry I. and during 

Stephen's reign the Cistercians brought about a 

religious revival. The Abbeys founded in the 

North. 

Henry II. 

Wace's Geste des Bretons (Brut d'Engleterre). 

Benoit de Sainte More's Roman de Troie. 

John of Salisbury's Polycraticus. 

Walter Map's De Nugis curialium; Golias. 

The Lais of Marie de France; written in Eng- 
land. 

Robert de Boron's Le petit Saint Graal. 

Wace finishes his Roman de Rou. 

Le Grand Saint Graal; Queste de Saint Graal; 
Lancelot du Lac, by Walter Map? 

Chrestien de Troye's Conte de Graal (Percevale). 

Chronicle of Benedict of Peterborough, contiaiued 
by Roger of Howden. 

Ranulf de Glanvill's work on English law. 

Richard Fitz Nigel's Dialogus de Scaccario. 

Gerald de Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis) — Itinera- 
rium; Journey in Wales; Conquest of Ireland — 
written in this and the two following reigns. 

Richard I. 

William of Newborough's Chronicle. 



326 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

In the middle of the 1 2th century the troubadour poetry of 
Southern France rose into its fine flower in the work of Bernart 
de Ventadorn. He had been preceded by Guilhem de Poitiers, 
the first troubadour of whom we know. Bertrand de Born, 
Geoffrey Rudel, Pierre Vidal are famous troubadours of this cen- 
tury. The lyrics of Northern France, those of the trouveres, grew 
out of this Provengal poetry. No lyrical poetry in England in this 
century. The chansons de geste of the last century in France 
were largely added to in this. Great literary activity prevailed in 
Wales from the middle of this century down to the death of 
Llewellyn in 1282. The epic of the Cid was shaped about 1160-70 
out of ballads that had sung the border battles of Moors and 
Spaniards. In Germany the Minnelieder arose in the middle of 
the century, and Wolfram von Eschenbach introduced his new 
conception of Parzival into the Arthurian legend. Also in the 
middle of this century the Niebelungen Lied was cast into its form. 
Italian poetry began with CiuUo d'Alcamo in Sicily, and Folca- 
chiero of Siena, in the years 1172-78. In this century also the 
mediaeval tales from India were cast into the History of the Seven 
Sages, and into the Disciplina Clericalis. These materials were 
moulded into various shapes by the French poets, and afterwards 
in England. 

A.D. 

iigg . . . John. 

Chronicle of Richard of Devizes. Annals of Barn- 
well. Chronicle of Jocelyn of Brakelond, and 
others. 
1150-1200 . Sayings of Alfred. 

1200-30 . . Roman de la Rose (Part I.) by Guillaume de Lorris. 
1205 . . . Loss of Normandy. 
1205 (cir.) . Layamon's Brut. 

1215 . . . The Ormulum. The Great Charter. 

1210-50 . , Reign of Frederick II. Italian poetry in Sicily. 

1216 . . . Henry III. 

Chronicle of Roger of Wendover at St. Albans. 
1235-73 . . Matthew Paris' Greater Chronicle; History of 
England; Lives of earlier abbots. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 32/ 

A.D. 

1220-76 . . Guido Guinicelli. Father of new national litera- 
ture in Italy. 
1220 (cir.) . Owl and Nightingale (Dorsetshire). 

1220 (cir.) . Ancren Rivvle (Dorsetshire). 

1 221 . . . Coming of Black Friars to England (Dominicans). 

1224 . . . Coming of Grey Friars (Franciscans). 

1225 ... St. Francis of Assisi's Song to the Sun. 
1225-35? . . The Bestiary. 

1230-40 (cir.) King Horn. 

1235-53 . . Robert Grossetete (Bp. of Lincoln). Chastel 

d'amour. 
1250 (cir.) . Genesis and Exodus. 
1258 . . . Provisions of Oxford, Proclamation of King's 

adhesion to them — in English as well as French. 
1262 . . . Miracle plays acted by the Town Guilds. 
1264 . . . Battle of Lewes — Ballad. 

1264 . . . Corpus Christi Day appointed; fully observed, 131 1. 
1268 . . . Roger Bacon's Opus Majus. 

After Lewes and its war-ballad, the Love Lyric begins in such 
verse as the Throstle and the Nightingale and the Cuckoo Song. 
Also the religious lyric in such verse as the Sorrows of Christ and 
the Lullaby, and the Love Song of Thomas de Hales, a Franciscan. 
Also the satirical lyric, such as the Land of Cockayne. In this 
reign Adam Marsh (De Marisco) has a famous Franciscan school 
at Oxford. The Harrowing of Hell, first dramatic piece in English, 
belongs to this reign. Northumbria begins again to write in second 
half of century. 

12^2 . . . Edward I. 

The Alexander Romance in English in this reign. 

The Tristan Story is also widely spread. 
Romances arise in Northumbria. Many war-ballads. 
1280-87 . . Guido delle Colonne's (a poet of Sicily, born 1250) 
Historia Destructionis Trojae. Visited England 
and wrote Historia de regibus et rebus Angliae. 
1290-93 . . Dante's Vita Nuova, 
1300 (cir.) . Gesta Romanorum. 



A.D. 

1300 (cir.) . 
1303 . • . 



1300-05 

1307 • 
1303-21 
1324 . 
1320-30 



328 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Havelok the Dane. 

Robert Manning of Brunne's Handlyng Synne. 
His Chronicle finished 1338. 

Roman de la Rose (Part II.), by Jean de Meung. 

Edzvard II. 

Dante's Divine Comedy. 

Court of Love at Toulouse. 

Cursor Mundi (Northumbrian). William Shore- 
ham's Poems (Kentish). A Cycle of Homilies, 
Legend Cycle (both Northumbrian) are now 
worked at. Sir Tristrem; Sire Otuel; Guy of 
Warwick ; Bevis of Hampton ; all now in English. 
132^ . . . Edward III. 

1330 . . . Pilgrimage of Human Life, a French poem by 
Guillaume de Delguileville. Legenda Aurea, 
by Jacobus a Voragine, Bishop of Genoa. 

Guillaume de Machault. (B. 1 282 (cir.) ; d. 1 37o(cir.).) 

Richard Rolle of Hampole's Pricke of Conscience. 

Dan Michel of Northgate's Ayenbite of Inwyt. 

Petrarca crowned laureate at Rome. 

Death of Richard Aungerville, Bishop of Durham, 
writer of Philobiblion; leaves library to Oxford. 

Songs of Laurence Minot on King Edward's wars. 

Collections of books, and University foundations in 
England now begin to serve literature. 

Decameron of Boccaccio. 1341, La Teseide. 1348, 
Filostrato. 

Romances are now written on the Welsh marches 
in alliterative Old English verse ; subject and 
mise-eit-scene French, verse and diction national. 
Among first of these, Joseph of Arimathie and 
two fragments of an Alexander Romance. 
1355 . . . William of Palerne. 1350? Tale of Gamelyn. 
1355 (cir.) . Anturs of Arthur at the Tarnawathelan. 
1360-70 (cir.) Sir Gawayne and the Grene ^ Perhaps by the 
Knight, Pearl, Cleanness V "philosophical 
and Patience. J Strode." 



1340 (cir.) 


1340 . . 


1341 . . 


1345 • • 


1333-52 . 


1350, etseq. 


1350-53 • 


1350 (cir.) 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



329 



A.D. 

1362-63 
1366-70 
1373 
1375 
1377 
1377 
1378? 
1379 

1380 . 
1380-83 
1382-85 



1383 (cir.) 
1385-89 . 



1393? 
[395 



1398? 



Langland's Vision of Piers the Plowman. (A-Text.) 

Chaucer's first poems. Book of the Duchess, 1369. 

Petrarca's Griselda. 

Barbour's Bruce. 

Richard II. 

B-Text of Piers the Plowman. 

Wyclif's Summa in Theologia. 

New College, Oxford; Latin School at Winchester 

founded by William of Wykeham. 
Wyclif's translation of the Bible. 
Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida. 
Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, Hous of Fame, 

Legend of Good Women. 
Wyclif's Trialogus. (Died 1384.) 
Chaucer's Prologue and many of the Canterbury 

Tales. 
Gower's Confessio Amantis. 
Chrysoloras comes to Florence to teach Greek. 
Guarino Guarini teaches Greek at Venice, Florence, 

Ferrara. (Born 1370; died 1460.) 
C-Text of Piers the Plowman. 



From Boccaccio to the middle of the i6th century a great mass of 
Italian Novelle were produced; used in England for plays, stories, &c. 



1399 • 

1400 . 
1411-12 
1413 ' 
1415 • 

1421 . 
14^2 . 

1422 . 

1422 . 

1423 . 

1424-25 



Henry IV. 

Death of Chaucer and Langland. 

Hoccleve's Gouvernail of Princes. 

Henry V. 

Eustache Deschamps dies. Alain Chartier and 

Christine de Pisan, his contemporaries. 
Lydgate's Troy Book. 1424-25, Story of Thebes. 
Henry VI 

James I. of Scotland : The King's Quair. 
Paston Letters begin; end 1509. 
John Aurispa brings from Greece to Italy more than 

200 MSS. 
Lydgate's Falles of Princes. 



330 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



1427 



Filelfo, laden with MSS., returns from Greece to 
Florence. 



Pletho, Bessarion, Gaza have diffused the spirit of ancient learn- 
ing in Italy by 1440. Universities at Pavia, Turin, Ferrara, Flor- 
ence, &c. Eight hundred MSS. left by Niccolo Niccoli to Florence, 
in 1436; cradle of the Laurentian Library. 



1449 

1453 

1450 (cir.) 

1460-80 

1 46 1 

1470 

1474-76 

1481 

1483 

1485 

1495? 

1501 

1503 
1504 
1506 

1507 

1507-08 

1509 • 
1509 . 

1513 . 
1513? . 

1515 • 

1516 . 
1516 . 

1518? . 

1518? . 



Pecock's Repressor of Overmuch blaming of the 

Clergy. 
Fall of Constantinople. 
Invention of Printing. 
Poems of Robert Henryson. 
Edivard IV. 
Malory's Morte Darthur. 
Caxton sets up printing press at Westminster. 
Luigi Pulci's Morgante Maggiore. 
Edward V. Richard III. 
Henry VII. 

Boiardo's Orlando Inamorato begun. 
Gavvin Douglas' Palace of Honour. 
Dunbar's Thistle and Rose. 
Sannazaro's Arcadia. 
Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure. 
Skelton's Bowge of Court; Boke of Phyllip 

Sparowe. 
Dunbar's Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins. 
Henry VIII. 
Erasmus : Praise of Folly. 
Gawin Douglas : Translation of the ^neid. 
Sir Thos. More's Life of Edward V. and History 

of Richard III. written. 
Trissino's Sofonisba; first use of blank verse in 

Italy. 
Ariosto's Orlando Furioso begun; the rest in 1532. 
Sir Thos. More's Utopia, written in Latin. 
Skelton's Colin Clout. 
Amadis de Gaul translated into English. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



331 



1524 . 

1527 • 

1528 . 
1520-40 
1532, etseq. 

1535 
1540 
1541? 

1545 

1547 

1549 

1549-52 

1551 

'S53 

1553 
1557 
1538 

1559 
1561-62 

1562 . 

1563 
1563 
1570 
1571 

1575 

1576 



1576 

1576 
1577 



Ronsard bora. (Died 1586.) 

Tyndale's translation of the New Testament. 

Lyndsay's Dreme. 

Heywood's Interludes. 

Rabelais' Gargantua, &c. 

Lyndsay's Satire of the Three Estates. 

Cranmer's Bible. 

Ralph Roister Doister, first English comedy, printed 
1566. 

Ascham's Toxophilus. 

Edward VI. 

Latimer's Sermon on the Ploughers. 

English Prayer Book. 

Ralph Robinson's translation of More's Utopia into 
English. 

Mary. 

Lyndsay's Monarchic. 

Tottel's Miscellany ; poems by Wyatt and Surrey. 

Elizabeth. 

Sackville's Mirror for Magistrates. 

Gorboduc, the first English Tragedy. Printed as 
Ferrex and Porrex, 1571. 

Ph.-^^r's Virgil. Many other translations of the 
classics before 1579. 

Foxe's Book of Martyrs. 

Sackville's Induction to Mirror for Magistrates. 

Ascham's Scholemaster. 

R. Edward's Damon and Pithias printed. 

Comedy of Gammer Gurton's Needle printed. Play 
of Apius and Virginia printed. 

Paradise of Dainty Devices; 1578, Gorgeous Gal- 
lery of Gallant Inventions; 1584, Handful! of 
Pleasant Delights — all Poetical Miscellanies. 

Three theatres built in London ; Blackfriars, the 
Curtain, the Theatre. 

Gascoigne's Steele Glas. (First verse satire.) 

Holinshed's Chronicle. 



332 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

A.D. 

1579-80 . . Lyly's Euphues. 1580-1601 (cir.) his dramas. 

1579 . . . Spenser's Shepheards Calendar. 

1579 . . . North's Plutarch's Lives. 

1580-81 . . Sidney's Arcadia and Apologia for Poetrie. 

1580-88 . . Montaigne's Essaies. 

1 581 . . . Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. 

1582? . . . Watson's Hecatoinpathia or Passionate Century. 

1583-1625? . Pamphleteers: Greene, Lodge, G. Harvey, Nash, 

Dekker, Breton. 

1584-92 . . Dramas of Greene. 1583, ^/ j<?^., Tales in prose. 

1584-98 . . Dramas of Peele. 

1586 . . . Warner's Albion's England. 

1587 . . . Marlowe's Tamburlaine acted. (Printed 1 590.) 
1588-90 . . Marlowe's Faustus, Jew of Malta, Edward II. 
1588-90 . . Series of Martin Marprelate Tracts. 
1588-90? . . Love's Labour's Lost. 

1589 ... Hakluyt's Voyages. 

1590 . . . Spenser's Faerie Queene (Books i.-iii. 1596, iv.-vi.). 

1 59 1 . . . Harrington's translation of Ariosto's Orlando. 
1593 . . . Donne's Satires (died 1626). 

1593 . . . Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. 

1594 . . . Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity (Bks. i.-iv. 1597, v.), 
1593-96 . . Many collections of Sonnets. 

1595 . . . Daniel's Hist, of Civil Wars of York and Lancaster. 
1596, <f/ Jif^. . Ben Jonson's Dramas. (Died 1637.) 

1594-96 . . Merchant of Venice. 

1597 . . . Bacon's Essays. (First set.) 
1597-98 . . Hall's Satires. 

1598 . , . Chapman's Homer (First part). Sylvester's trans- 

lation of Du Bartas. 

1598-99 . . Marston's Satires. 

1596-98 . . Drayton's Barons' Wars and England's Heroical 
Epistles. 

1599 . . . The Globe Theatre built. 

1600 . . . England's Helicon; England's Parnassus; Belve- 

dere; all poetical Miscellanies. 

1600 . . . Fairfax's translation of Tasso. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



333 



A.D. 
1600 . 

1600-81 



1603 (cir.) 


? . 


1603 . . 




1603 . . 




1604 . . 




1605 . . 




1606-16 




1609 . 




1610-25 (c 


ir.) 


I6I0 . 




I6II . 




I6I2 . 




1612-20 




I6I3-I4 




I6I3-I6 




I6I3 . 




I6I3 






I6I3 






I6I4 






I6I5 






I6I5 






I6I6 






I62I 






1622 






1623 






1623 






1623 







Lope de Vega began his dramas about 1590, and 
continued writing till his death in 1635. 

Calderon, who had a large influence on the French 
Drama of the 17th and i8th centuries, on the 
English Restoration Drama, and on the Italian, 
German and English poetry of 1 8th and 19th 
centuries. 

The Return from Parnassus. 

Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays. 

James I. 

Knolles' History of the Turks, 

Authorised Version of the Bible. 

Bacon's Advancement of Learning (Books i. and ii.). 

Cervantes' Don Quixote. 

Shakespeare's Sonnets published. 

Dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher. 

Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victory. 

Speed's History of Great Britain. 

Webster's first drama, The White Devil (printed). 

T. Shelton's Translation of Don Quixote. 

Drayton's Polyolbion. 

Browne's Britannia's Pastorals; 1614, The Shep- 
herd's Pipe. 

Purchas his Pilgrimage. 

Wither's Abuses Stript and Whipt. 

Drummond of Hawthornden's first poem, (D. 1649.) 

Raleigh's History of the World. 

Sandys' Travels. 

Wither's Shepherd's Hunting. 

Chapman's Homer finished. Shakespeare dies. 

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. 

Massinger's Virgin Martyr. (Died 1639.) 

Webster's Duchess of Malfi (printed). 

Waller's first poems. 

The " First Folio " of Shakespeare. 

Chapman, Tourneur, Middleton, and other drama- 
tists wrote during this reign. 



334 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

A.D. 

162^ , . . Charles I. 

1628 . . . Harvey's De Motu Sanguinis. 

1629 . . . Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. 
1 63 1 . . . George Herbert's Temple. 

1635? . . . Sir Thos. Browne's Religio Medici (pub. 1642). 

1632-37 . . Milton's Allegro, Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas. 

1633 . . . Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island. 

1634 , . . Ford's historical play of Perkin Warbeck. 

1636 . . . Corneille's first tragedy, the Cid. His last play, 1 675. 

1636 . . . French Academy founded. 

1640 . . . Thomas Carew's poems. 

1 641 . . . Milton's first pamphlet. 

1641 . . . Evelyn's Diary begins (ends 1697; published 1 81 8). 

1642 . . . Theatres closed. 

1642 . . . Fuller's Holy and Profane state. 

1642 . . . Denham's Cooper's Hill. 

1642 . . . Hobbes' De Cive. 

1644 . . . Milton's Areopagitica. 

1645 • • • Waller's poems. 

1645 • • • Meetings held vi^hich lead to formation of the 

Royal Society. 

1646 . . . Crashaw's Steps to the Temple. 

1647 . . . Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying. 

1647 . . . Cowley's Mistress. Davideis, i64i(?). 
1647-48 , . Herrick's Noble Numbers; Hesperides. 

1648 ... J. Beaumont's Psyche or Love's Mystery. 

1648 . . . Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea. 

1649 . . . Lovelace's Lucasta. 
7(5^9 . . . C 07)11)1 onwealth. 

1650 . . . Baxter's Saints' Rest. 

1650 . . . Milton's Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. 
1650-52 . . Marvell's Garden poems written. 
1650-56 . . Vaughan's Silex Scintillans. 

1650-57 . . Pascal's Provincial Letters. 

1 65 1 . . . Hobbes' Leviathan. 

1653 . . . Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler. 

1653 . . . Moliere's first play. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



335 



A.D. 

1656 . 

1659 . 

1659 . 
1659-60 

1660 . 

ibdo . 

1660 . 

1662 . 

1663 . 
1663 . 
1663 . 

1663 . 

1663-67 

1664 • 
1667 . 
1667 . 
1667 . 

1667 . 

1668 . 
1670 . 

1670 . 

1671 . 
1671-77 

1672 . 
1674 . 
1678 . 
1678 . 
1678 . 

1680 . 

1681 . 

1682 . 
1684 . 



Harrington's Oceana. 

Dryden's Stanzas on the Death of Cromwell. 

Corneille's Essay on the Three Unities. 

Pepys' Diary begins (finished 1669; published 1 825). 

Boileau's first satire. 

Cha7'les II. 

Re-opening of the theatres by Davenant and 
Killigrew. 

Royal Society incorporated. 

Dryden's first play, the Wild Gallant. 

Butler's Hudibras" (Part 1.)- 

Algernon Sidney's Discourses concerning Govern- 
ment, published 1698. 

The London Public Intelligencer. (Becomes the 
London Gazette, 1666.) 

Plays of Racine. Esther, 1689 (?), Athalie, i69o(?). 

La Fontaine's first book of Contes. 

Dryden's Annus Mirabilis; Essay on Dramatic Poesy. 

Cowley's Essays. 

Milton's Paradise Lost. 

Petty's Treatise on Taxes. 

La Fontaine's first book of Fables. (Died 1695.) 

Izaak Walton's Lives. 

Pascal's Les Pensees. 

Paradise Regained. Samson Agonistes. 

Dramas of Wycherley. 

Dryden's Essay on Heroic Plays. 

Boileau's Art of Poetry. 

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. (Part I.) 

Dryden's All for Love. (In blank verse.) 

Cudworth's Intellectual System of the Universe. 

Filmer's Patriarcha. 

Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel. (First part.) 

Dryden's Medal, MacFlecknoe, Religio Laici. 

Pilgrim's Progress. (Part II.) 

Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion written 
during this reign. (Published 1707.) 



336 

A.D. 

1687 . 
1687 . 
1687 . 
j688-8g 
1690 . 
1692 . 
I 693-1 700 
1694 
I 697-1 705 
1698 
I 698-1 707 
1700 , 
1700 . 
1702 . 
1702 . 
I 702-05 

1704 . 

1704 . 
1704-13 
1709 . 
I 709-1 I 
1709-44 
1709 . 
1711-1 

1712 . 

1713 . 

1714 . 
J714 . 
1715-20 
1715, etseq. 
1719 . 
1724-34 

1725 . 
1726-30 



:2-i4 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

James II. 

Newton's Principia. 

Defoe's first tract. 

La Bruyere's Les Caracteres. 

The Revolution. William III. 

Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. 

Sir Wm. Temple's Miscellanea, Vol. ii. 

Congreve's dramas. 

Dryden's Last Play. 

Dramas of Vanbrugh. 

Collier's Short View of the Immorality of the Stage 

Dramas of Farquhar. 

Dryden's Fables. (Nov. 1699.) 

Prior's Carmen Seculare. 

Anne. 

Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. 

Steele's Plays. (1722. Comedy of the Conscious 
Lovers, his last play.) 

Swift's Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books. (Writ- 
ten by 1596-97.) 

Addison's Campaign. Rosamond (opera), 1706. 

Defoe's Review. 

Mat Prior's Poems. 

The Tatler. 

Writings of Bishop Berkeley. 

Pope's Pastorals. (Written 1704-05.) 

The Spectator. 

Pope's Rape of the Lock. (Final form 1 714.) 

Addison's Cato. 

Gay's Shepherd's Week. 

George I. 

Pope's Homer's Iliad. 

Le Sage's Gil Bias. 

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. 1720-25, Other novels. 

Bp. Burnet's History of my own Times published. 

Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd. (First form 1723.) 

Thomson's Seasons. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



337 



I 



A.O. 

1726-27 
1727 . 

1727 . 

1728 . 
1728 . 

1730 o 

1732-34 
1732-48 

1735 . 

1736 
1737 

1738 

1739 
1740 
I74I 

1740-41 
1742 

1 742-69 

1744 

1744 

1746 

1748 

1748 

1748 

1749 

1749 

1750-52 

1751-52 

1754 

1754 

1754-6 

1755 

1756 

1757 

1758 



Swift's Gulliver's Travels. 
George II. 

Gay's Fables. 1728, Beggar's Opera. 
Pope's Dunciad. (First form. Others in 1 729-42-43.) 
Voltaire's Henriade. 

Marivaux: Lejeudel'amour etduhasard. (D. 1763.) 
Pope's Essay on Man. Moral Essays, 1732-35. 
Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. 
Johnson's Translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abys- 
sinia. (His first work.) 
Butler's Analogy of Religion. 
Shenstone's Schoolmistress. (Final form, 1742.) 
Johnson's London. 
Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. 
Richardson's Pamela. 1748, Clarissa Harlowe. 
Warburton's Divine Legation. 
Hume's Essays. 

Fielding's Joseph Andrews. 1749, Tom Jones. 
Gray's Poems. (Collected edition 1768.) 
Johnson's Life of Savage. 
Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination. 
Collins' Odes. 

Smollett's Roderick Random. 
Thomson's Castle of Indolence. 
Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois. 
Diderot's Encyclopedic begun. 
Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes; Irene. 
Johnson's Rambler. 

Hume's Principles of Morals and Political Discourses 
Richardson's Sir Chas. Grandison. 
Edwards' Freedom of the Will. 
Hume's History of England. 
Johnson's Dictionary. 
Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful; Vin 

dication of Natural Society. 
Hume's Natural History of Religion. 
Robertson's History of Scotland. 1769, Charles V. 



338 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



1758 . , . Lessing's Litteraturbriefe. 

1759 • • • Johnson's Rasselas. 

1759 . . . Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments. 

1759 • • • Sterne's Tristram Shandy. (Vols, i and 2.) 
1759-90 . , Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art. 

J'] 60 . . . George III. 

1760 . . . Rousseau's Nouvelle Helotse. 

1760 , . . Sterne's Tristram Shandy. (2 vols.; finished 1765.) 

1760-65 , . Macpherson's Ossian. 

1761-64 . , Poems of Churchill. 

1762 . . . Falconer's Shipwreck. 

1764-70 . . Chatterton's Poems. 

1765 . , . Goldsmith's Traveller. 

1765 . . . Bishop Percy's Reliques of English Poetry. 

1 765 . . . H. Walpole's Castle of Otranto. 

1766 . . . Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. (Written 1762 ?) 
1766 . . . Lessing's Laokoon. 

1768-78 . . Plays of Goldsmith and Sheridan. 

1769 . . . Burke's Present State of the Nation. 
1769-72 . . Letters of Junius. 

1770 , . . Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents. 
1770 . . . Goldsmith's Deserted Village. 

1771-74 . , Beattie's Minstrel. 

1773 • • • Ferguson's Poems. 

1774 . . . Burke's Speech on American Taxation. 

1774 . . . Goethe's Werther. 

1775 • • • Beaumarchais : Le Mariage de Figaro. 

1775 . , . Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America. 

1776 . . . Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. 
1776 , . . Declaration of Independence. 

1776 . . . Paine's Common Sense. 

1777-81 . . T. Warton's History of English Poetry. 

1776-88 . . Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

1777 , . . Robertson's History of America. 

1778 . . . Frances Burney's Evelina. 
1779-81 . . Johnson's English Poets. 

1 781 . . , Schiller's Die Rauber. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



339 



1 



A.D. 

1783 . 

1783 . 

1785 . 

1786 . 
1786 . 
1789 . 

1789 . 

1790 . 
1791-92 

1791 . 
1792-94 
1793 . 

1793 . 

1794 . 
1796 . 

1796 . 
1796-97 

1797 . 

1797 , 

1798 . 
1798 . 
1798 . 

1798 . 

1799 . 

1799 . 

1800 . 

1801 . 

1802 . 
1802 . 
1805 . 
1807 . 
1807 . 

1807 . 
1807-08 

1808 . 

1809 . 



Crabbe's Village. 

Blake's Poetical Sketches, 

Cowper's Task. 

Samuel Rogers' Poems. 

Burns' first Poems. 

Blake's Songs of Innocence. 1794, Songs ol 

Experience. 
White's Natural History of Selborne. 
Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. 
Paine's Rights of Man. 1794-95, Age of Reason. 
Boswell's Life of Johnson. 
Arthur Young's Travels in France. 
Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice. 

Wordsworth's Evening Walk; Descriptive Sketches 
Coleridge and Southey's Fall of Robespierre. 

Poems; by Coleridge and Lamb. 

Scott's translation of Burger's Lenore. 

Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace. 

Poems by Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd. 

Poetry of the Anti- Jacobin. 

Lyrical Ballads; by Coleridge and Wordsworth. 

Malthus' Essay on the Principles of Population. 

Landor's Gebir and other Poems. 

Ebenezer Elliott's Vernal Walk. 

Scott's translation of Gotz von Berlichingen. 

Campbell's Pleasures of Hope. 

Coleridge's translation of Schiller's Wallenstein. 

Southey's Thalaba. (He continued writing till 1843.) 

Scott's Border Minstrelsy. 

The Edinburgh Review. 

Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. 

Byron's Hours of Idleness. 

Wordsworth's Poems in 2 vols. 

T. Moore's Irish Melodies begun. 

Lamb's Specimens of Dramatic Poetry. 

Scott's Marmion. 1810, Lady of the Lake. 

The Quarterly Review. 



340 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

A.D. 

1809 . . . Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 

1810 . . . AllanCunningham's first pubHshed poems. (D.I 842.) 
1811-18 . . Novels of Jane Austen. 

1812-18 . . Byron's Childe Harold. 

1 81 3 . . . Shelley's Queen Mab. 181 6, Alastor. 

1 814 . . . Scott's Waverley. (His novels continue till 1831.) 
1 8 14 . . . Wordsworth's Excursion. 

1814 . . . H. Gary's Translation of Dante. 

181 6 , . . Coleridge's Christabel ; Kubla Khan. 
1816? . . . Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini. 

1817 . . . Byron's Manfred. i8i8,Beppo; 1819-23, Don Juan. 
18 1 7 . . . Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. 

1 81 7 . . . Keats' first poems. 

1817 . . . Bryant's Thanatopsis. 

\%i'^,etseq. . Hazlitt's Dramatic and Poetical Criticisms. (Died 
1830.) 

l8i8 . . . Hallam's View of the State of Europe during the Mid- 
dle Ages. 1827, Constitutional Hist, of England. 

1 819 . . . Irving's The Sketch-Book. 

1820 . . . George IV. 

1820 . . . Keats' Hyperion and other Poems. 

1820 . . . Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. 

1821 . . . Byron's Cain and other dramas. 

1821 . . . DeQuincey's Confessions ofan English Opium Eater. 

1 82 1 . . . Shelley's Adonais and Epipsychidion. 

1 82 1 . . . Cooper's The Spy. 
1821-23 . . Lamb's Essays of Elia. 

1822 ... T. L. Beddoes' Bride's Tragedy. 
1822 . . . Rogers' Italy. 

1822-33 . . Prof. Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianse. (In Blackwood.) 

1824 . . o Carlyle's translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. 

1825 . . • Macaulay's Essay on Milton. 

1826 . . . Poems by Two Brothers. (Chas. and Alfd. Tennyson.) 

1827 . , . Disraeli's Vivian Gray. 
1827 . . . Keble's Christian Year. 
1827 . . . Bulwer Lytton's Pelham. 

1827 . . . Poe's Tamerlane and other Poems. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



341 



William IV. 

Alfred Tennyson : Poems. 

Moore's Life of Byron. 

Mrs. Hemans' Songs of the i\ffections. 
seq. . Ebenezer Elliott's Corn Law Rhymes, 

Robert Browning's Pauline; published 1833. 

Death of Sir Walter Scott. Death of Goethe. 
. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. 
, Dickens' Pickwick. 

Emerson's Nature. 

Holmes' Poems. 

Victoria. 

Carlyle's French Revolution. 

Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. 

Whittier's Poems. 
, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. 
. Longfellow's Voices of the Night. 

Newman's Tracts for the Times, No. xc. 

Browning's Dramatic Lyrics. 

Ruskin's Modern Painters. (Vol. I.) 
, C. Bronte's Jane Eyre. 

. Arnold's Strayed Reveller and other Poems. 
. Macaulay's History of England. (Vol. I.) 

Thackeray's Vanity Fair. 
. Lowell's Biglow Papers (first series). 
. Thoreau's Week on the Concord and Merrimac 

Rivers. 
. Parkman's Cahfornia and Oregon Trail. 
. Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. 
. Tennyson's In Memoriam. 
. Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. 
. Whitman's Leaves of Grass. 
. Froude's History of England. (Vol. I.) 
. Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic. 
. George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life. 
. Morris' Defence of Guinevere and other PoemSo 
. Tennyson's Idylls of the King. 



342 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



1858 . . . Holmes' Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 

1858 . . . Fitzgerald's Translation of Omar Khayyam, 

1859 . . . Darwin's Origin of Species. 
1859 . . Mill's On Liberty. 

1862 . . . Spencer's First Principles. 

1863 . . . Huxley's Man's Place in Nature. 

1864 , . . Lowell's Fireside Travels. 

1865 . . . Meredith's Rhoda Fleming. 

1865 . . . Arnold's Essays in Criticism (first series)* 

1866 o . , Swinburne's Poems and Ballads. 
1866 . . . Whittier's Snow-Bound. 

1869 . . . Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. 

1870 . . . Rossetti's Poems. 

1870 , . . Bret Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp. 

1872 . . Howells' Their Wedding Journey. 

1873 , . c Pater's Studies in the Renaissance. 
1875 . . . James' A Passionate Pilgrim. 
1882 . . . Stevenson's New Arabian Nights« 



INDEX 



Born. Dieo 

1672 , , Addison, Joseph, 182, 183, 187, 191, 192, 195.. . . 1719 

849 Alfred, King, 3, 15, 19, 23, 24, 27 901 

Fl. 1006 -ffilfric (Grammaticus) , 29 

Fl. 1005. ^Ifric (Bata), 29 

908? ^thelwold. Bishop, 28 984 

1721. Akenside, Mark, 214, 219 1770 

735 Alcuin, 27 804 

Alexander, Sir W. (see Stirling, Earl of) ..... 

Fl. 1420 Andrew of Wyntoun, 91 

1555 Andrewes, Lancelot, 153, 154. 1626 

1667 Arbuthnot, Dr. John, 185 1735 

1822 Arnold, Matthew, 248, 271, 279. .1888 

1515 Ascham, Roger, 84, 99 1568 

1775 Austen, Jane, 210 1817 

1561 Bacon, Sir Francis, 104, 108, 1C9, 123, 144, 152. .1626 

673 Baeda, 3, 7, 14, 15, 25, 26 735 

1826. . , Bagehot, Walter, 272 1877 

1816 Bailey, Philip, 247 

1316? Barbour, John, 91 1395 

1475? Barclay, Alexander, 88 1552 

1820 Barnes, William, 246 1886 

1630 Barrow, Isaac, 179 1677 

1615 Baxter, Richard, 154 1691 

1735 Beattie, James, 216, 220 1803 

1584 Beaumont, Francis, 144-145 1616 

1616 Beaumont, Joseph, 159 1699 

1803 Beddoes, Thomas, 244 1849 

1640 BehU; Aphra, 194 1689 

343 



344 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Died 

628? Benedict, Biscop, 26 690 

1748 Bentham, Jeremy, 208 1832 

1662 Bentley, Richard, 182, 190 1742 

1685 Berkeley, Bishop, 188, 190 1753 

1388? Berners, Juliana, 75 

1467 , Berners, Lord, 83 o 1532 

1650? Blackmore, Sir Richard, 187 1729 

1699 Blair, Robert, 213 1746 

1757 Blake, William, 222-224 1827 

Fl, 1470-1492 Blind Harry, 91 

1766 Bloomfield, Robert, 225 1823 

1545 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 154 1613 

1678 Bolingbroke, Lord, 185, 190, 199, 1751 

1803 Borrow, George, 260 1881 

1740 Boswell, James, 199 1795 

1627 Boyle, Robert, 151 1691 

1816 Bronte, Charlotte, 260 1855 

1554 Brooke, Lord (Fulke Greville), 123 1628 

Broome, Richard, 148 1652? 

1689 Broome, William, 185 1745 

1778 Brown, Thomas, 208 1820 

1771 Brown, Charles Brockden, 291 1810 

1605 Browne, Sir Thomas, 154 1682 

1591 Browne, William, 157 1643 

1809 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 278 1861 

1812 Browning, Robert, 224, 244, 247, 277 1889 

1730 Bruce, James, 209 1794 

1746 Bruce, Michael, 221, 222 1767 

1794 Bryant, William Cullen, 311 1878 

1628 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 176, 

193 1687 

1822 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 270 1862 

1628 Bunyan, John, 168 1688 

1729 Burke, Edmund, 199, 205 1797 

1643 Burnet, Bishop, 179, 182 1715 

1752 Burney, Frances (Madame D'Arblay), 202 .... 1840 

1759 Bums, Robert, 90, 222, 226, 243 1796 

1577 Burton, Robert, 154 1640 

1692 Butler, Bishop, 190 1752 

1612 Butler, Samuel, 174, 181 1680 

1788 Byron, Lord, 236, 237, 243, 244. 1824 



INDEX 345 

Born. Died. 

Fl. 670 Caedmon, 3, 12-19 

1831 Calverley, Charles Stuart, 279 1834 

1551 Camden, William, 151 1623 

1777 Campbell, Thomas, 207, 235 1844 

Temp. Hen. VI. .Campeden, Hugh de, 75 

Campion, Thomas, 108 , 1619 

1770 Canning, George, 207 1827 

1393 Capgrave, John, 75 1464 

1598? Carew, Thomas, 158 1639? 

1795 Carlyle, Thomas, 206, 268 1881 

1422? Caxton, William, 77, 78, 86, 87 1491? 

1748 Cecil, Richard, 208 1810 

1667? Centlivre, Susannah, 194 1723 

1780 Chalmers, Dr., 208 1847 

1559? Chapman, George, 117, 141-143 . , 1634 

1619 Charleton, Walter, 181 1707 

1752 Chatterton, Thomas, 217 1770 

1340 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 34, 52, 61-70, 78, 86, 88, 90, 

91, 94, 216 1400 

1514 Cheke, Sir John, 82 1557 

Fl. 1430 Chestre, Thomas, 75 

1602 Chilling worth, William, 150, 153, 179 1644 

1731 Churchill, Charles, 214 1764 

1671 Cibber, Colley, 185, 195 1757 

1609 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 150, 153 1674 

1675 Clarke, Samuel, 190 1729? 

1835 .Clemens, Samuel L. (Mark Twain), 307 

1819 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 248 1861 

1772 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 122, 166, 206-208, 227, 

229, 230 1834 

1467? Colet, John, 82, 104. '. 1519 

1650 Collier, Jeremy, 194 1726 

1676 Collins, Anthony, 190 1729 

1721 Collins, William, 157, 214, 220. 1759 

1732 Colman, George (elder), 195 1794 

1762 Colman, George (younger), 195 1836 

1670 Congreve, William, 194, 195 1729 

1562 Constable, Henry, 119, 156 1613 

1789 Cooper, James Fenimore, 293 1851 

1577? Coryat, Thomas, 152 ...o 1617 

1630 Cotton, Charles, 117, 191 » 1687 



34^ ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. ^ Died 

1571 Cotton, Sir Robert, 154 1631 

1488 Coverdale, Miles, 85 , 1568 

1618 Cowley, Abraham, 159, 172, 173, 182, 191 1667 

1731 Cowper, William, 90, 213, 222-225, 243 1800 

1754 Crabbe, George, 222, 225 1832 

1489 Cranmer, Thomas, 85 1556 

1613? .Crashaw, Richard, 7, 157, 158 , 1649 

1617 Cudworth, Ralph, 179 1688 

1732 Cumberland, Richard, 195 1811 

Fl. 8th century. .Cynewulf, 5-7, 12, 15, 19, 21, 22, 48, 49 

1562 Daniel, Samuel, 108, 119, 121, 152 1619 

1795 Darley, George, 244 1846 

1809 Darwin, Charles, 274 ... .1882 

1606 Davenant, Sir William, 148, 174, 193 1668 

Fl. 1623 Davenport, Robert, 148 

1569. Davies, Sir John, 123 i6a6 

Fl. 1606 Day, John, 143 

1661? Defoe, Daniel, 183, 187-189 1731 

1570? Dekker, Thomas, 141, 142 1641? 

1615 Denham, Sir John, 172, 173 1669 

1785 .De Quincey, Thomas, 207 1859 

1812 Dickens, Charles. 261 1870 

1804 .Disraeli, Benjamin, 259 1881 

1840 Dobson, Austin, 279 

1573 Donne, John, 124, 157 1631 

1637 Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, 177 1706 

1474? Douglas, Gawin, 90, 93 1522 

1795 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 311 1820 

1563 Drayton, Michael, 119, 121, 122 1631 

1585 Drummond, of Hawthomden, William, 124, 157. 1649 

1631 Dryden, John, 68, 159, 168, 172-174, 178, 181, 

184, 193, 198, 216, 238 1700 

Du Jon, Francis (see Junius) 

1465? Dunbar, William, 90, 92-94. 1530? 

924 Dunstan, Archbishop, 28 988 

1700? Dyer, John, 219 1758 

640? Ealdhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, 3, 18 709 

1601? Earle, John, 153 1665 

Ecgberht, Archbishop, 27 766 



INDEX 347 

Born. Died 

1767 Edgeworth, Maria, 210. 1849 

1703 Edwards, Jonathan, 288 1758 

1490? Elyot, Sir Thomas, 83. 1546 

1803 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 303, 316 » . 1882 

1467 Erasmus, 82, 87 1536 

1635? Etherege, Sir George, 194 1691 

1819 Evans, Marian (George Eliot), 263 1880 

1620 Evelyn, John, 182 1706 

Fairfax, Edward, 116 1635 

1678. Farquhar, George, 194 1707 

1683 Fenton, Elijah, 185 o . 1730 

1750 Fergusson, Robert, 222 1774 

1782. Ferrier, Susan, 210 1854 

1707 .Fielding, Henry, 195, 201 1754 

Filmer, Sir Robert, 180 1653 

1459? Fisher, Bishop, 82 , 1535 

1809 Fitzgerald, Edward, 247, 279 1883 

Flecknoe, Richard, 176 1678? 

Flemming, Robert, 80 1483 

1588? Fletcher, Giles, 157 1623 

1579 Fletcher, John, 139, 144, 145, 161 1625 

1582 Fletcher, Phineas, 157 1650 

Florence of Worcester, 39 1118 

1553? Florio, John, 117 o 1625 

1720 Foote, Samuel, 195 1777 

FI. 1639 .Ford, John, 147 

1394? » Fortescue, Sir John, 'J^ 1476? 

1516 Foxe, John, loi 1587 

1706 Franklin, Benjamin, 289 1790 

1823 Freeman, Edward Augustus, 270 1892 

1818 Froude, James Anthony, 269 1894 

1608 Fuller, Thomas, 153, 154 1661 

Fl. 1140? Gaimar, Geoffrey, 41 

1717 Garrick, David, 195, 216 1779 

1661 Garth, Sir Samuel, 187 1719 

1525? Gascoigne, George, 99, 124 1577 

1810 Gaskell, Mrs., 264 .1865 

1685 Gay, John, 185, 187, 195, 222 1732 

mo? Geoffrey of Monmouth, 40, 44, 71 1154 



348 ExNGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Died 

1737 Gibbon, Edward, 203 1794 

Fl. 1639 Glapthorae, Henry, 148 

Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of , 79 1446 

1756 Godwin, William, 210 1836 

1536? Golding, Arthur, 100 1605? 

1728 Goldsmith, Oliver, 195, 199, 202, 206, 220, 221 1774 

1540 Googe, Barnaby, loi 1594 

1555 Gosson, Stephen, 108 1624 

1325? Gower, John, 58, 59, 69, 79 1408 

Grafton, Richard, 102, 152 1572? 

1716 Gray, Thomas, 157, 174, 215-216, 219-221, 235. . . 1771 

1837 Green, John Richard, 269 1883 

1696 Green, Matthew, 187 1737 

1560? Greene, Robert, no, 131, 132, 134 1592 

Greville, Fulke (see Brooke, Lord) 

Grey, William, Bishop of Ely, 80 1478 

1519 Grimoald, Nicholas, 97 1562 

1446? Grocyn, William, 82 1519 

1794 Grote, George, 270 1871 

Gunthorpe, John, Dean of Wells, 80 1498 

1605 Habington, William, 159 1654 

1552? Hakluyt, Richard, 109 , 1616 

1584 Hales, John, 153, 179 1656 

1651 o . . .Halifax, Charles Montague, Lord, 177 c 1715 

1574 Hall, Joseph, Bishop of Norwich, 124, 153 1656 

1764 Hall, Robert, 208 1831 

1777 Hallam, Henry, 209 1859 

1790 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 311 1867 

1757 Hamilton, Alexander, 291 1804 

1677 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 216 1746 

1378 Harding, John, 75 1465? 

1561 Harington, Sir John, 116 1612 

1611 Harrington, James, 123, 180 1677 

1839 Harte, Francis Bret, 297, 322. 

1705 Hartley, David, 203 1757 

1545?. . = Harvey, Gabriel, loi, 108, no 1630 

1578 Harvey, William, 151 1657 

Hawes, Stephen, 86 1523? 

1804 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 295 1864 

1745 Hayley, William, 209 , . . . , 1820 



INDEX 349 

Born. Died. 

1778 Hazlitt, William, 207 1830 

1793 Hemans, Felicia, 244 , 1835 

1084? Henry of Huntingdon, 40 » 1155 

1430? Henryson, Robert, 92 „ 1506? 

1593 Herbert, George, 157. 158 1633 

1591 Herrick, Robert, 157-160, 219 1674 

1497? Heywood, John, 128 » 1580? 

Heywood, Thomas, 100. 1650? 

Higden, Ranulf, 70 1364 

1588 Hobbes, Thomas, 123, 150, 153, 180 1679 

1370? Hoccleve, Thomas, 73 1450^" 

1745 Holcroft, Thomas, 210 1809 

Holinshed, Raphael, 192 1580? 

i8c9 Holmes, Oliver "Wendell, 305, 317 1894 

1799 Hood, Thomas, 225 1845 

1554? Hooker, Richard, 109 1600 

1770? Hope, Thomas, 210 1831 

1837 Howells, William Dean, 297 

1711 Hume, David, 202-205, 208 1776 

Hunnis, William, 120 1597 

1784 Hunt, Leigh, 241, 242 1859 

1694 Hutcheson, Francis, 203 1746 

1825 Huxley, Thomas, 275. 1895 

1753 Jnchbald, Elizabeth, 210 1821 

1783 Irving, Washington, 292, 299 1859 

1394 James I. of Scotland, 91 1437 

1843 James, Henry, 297. 

1743 Jefferson, Thomas, 290 1826 

1773 Jeffrey, Francis, 207 1850 

Fl. 1387 John of Trevisa, 70, 78 

1709 Johnson, Samuel, 197, 198, 205, 213, 216. 1784 

1573? Jonson, Ben, 109, 133, 141, 142, 144, 157, 160 1637 

1589 Junius (Francis du Jon), 16 1677 

i8th century "Junius" (writer of the "Letters," 1769-1772), 

197. 205 

1795 Keats, John, 117, 228, 240-244 1821 

1792 Keble, John, 247 , . . . 1866 

1637 Ken, Thomas, Bishop, 177 1711 



350 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Dmt 

1819 c . .Kingsley, Charles, 247, 265, 279 1875 

1550? Knolles, Richard, 152 1610 

1557? Kyd, Thomas, 131 o... i59S? 

. = . . o ■> Lacy, John, 194. 1681 

1775 = . . . o .Lamb. Charles, 123, 148, 207, 208 1834 

1802 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth ("L.E. L."), 244. ..1838 

1775 Landor, Walter Savage, 207, 208 1864 

1735 Langhom, Dr. John, 221 1779 

1330? Langland, William, 49, 52-58, loi 140c 

1842 Lanier, Sidney, 322 1881 

1485? .Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of Worcester, 86 1555 

Fl. 1200 Layamon, 33, 34, 41-43, 48. 

1757 o Lee, Harriet, 210 1851 

1653?. .0. .. Lee, Nat, 194 .1692 

1750. Lee, Sophia, 210 , . o 1824 

1506? Leland, John, 83 .1552 

Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, 3 1072 

1616 .L'Estrange, Sir Roger, i8c ., 1704 

1806... Lever, Charles, 259. 1872 

Lichfield, William, 75 1447 

1468?. Lilly, William, 82 1522 

1809 Lincoln, Abraham, 298. 1865 

1771 Lingard, John, 209 1851 

1632. Locke, John, 123, 180 1704 

1821. .......... .Locker-Lampson, Frederick, 279 1895 

1794. . . .... .Lockhart, John Gibson, 209, 210 1854 

1558?. .Lodges Thomas, no, 120, 124 1625 

1807 .Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 312 1882 

1618 ............ Lovelace, Richard, 158 1658 

1819 .Lov/ellj James Russell, 306, 318 1891 

1370?. ......... .Lydgate, John, 47, 72, 73, 78, 99, loi. 1451? 

1554? Lyly, John, 106, 131 , 1606 

1490. .Lyndsay, Sir David, 94, 95, 221 1555 

1803. .Lytton^ Edward G. E. L. Bulwer, 278 1873 

1800. Macaulaj'-, Thomas Babington, 267, 279 1859 

1765 ....... .Mackintosh^ Sir James, 206. 1832 

1697. . . . ... .Macklin, Charles, 195 1797 

1736 Macpherson, James, 217. .................... .1796 

1772 .McCrie, Thomas, 209. ... ....o ....... o ...... . 1835 



INDEX 351 

Born. DiEt 

1705? Mallet, David, 216 , 1765 

Fl. 1470 Malory, Sir Thomas, ^j , 

1766 Malthus, Thomas, 209 1834 

1670? Mandeville, Bernard, 190 , 1733 

Fl. 1288-1388 Mannyng, of Brunne, Robert, 38, 51 

Fl. 1200 Map, Walter, 45 

1564 Marlowe, Christopher, 119, 120, 131, 133, 143, 

222 1593 

1792 .Marryat, Frederick, 259 1848 

1575? Marston, John, 124, 141, 142 1634 

1621 o .Marvell, Andrew, 157, 161, 174, 175, 219 .... 1678 

1583. .Massinger, Philip, 146 164c 

1663 .Mather, Cotton, 287, 299 1728 

Matthew Paris, 39 , 1259 

14th century Maundevile, Sir John, 70 

1595...... May, Thomas, 153 1650 

1828 Meredith, George, 265 

1808 Merivale, Charles, 270 1893 

1735 Mickle, William, 221 1788 

1570? Middleton, Thomas, 146 1627 

1773 Mill, James, 209 1836 

1806 Mill, John Stuart, 274 1873 

1791 Milman, Henry Hart, 270 .1868 

1608 Milton, John, 16, 90, 96, 144, 155, 161-168, 171, 

173, 219, 224 1674 

1300?. Minot, Laurence, 51 1352^ 

1744 Mitford, William, 209 , 1827 

Montague, Charles (see Halifax, Lord) 

1779 Moore, Thomas, 209, 236 1852 

1614 More, Henry, 159 1687 

1478 More, Sir Thomas, 40, 82, 83 1535 

1834 Morris, William, 279-280 1896 

1814 , . . .Motley, John Lothrop, 300 1877 

1649 .Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of, 177. 1721 

1727 Murphy, Arthur, 195 1805 

Fl. 1638 Nabbes, Thomas, 148 

1567 c . . . . . Nash, Thomas, loS, 131 1601 

Fl. 1375 Nassington, William of , 75 

1620 Nevile, Henry, 180 1694 

1801 Newman, John Henry, 273 189c 



352 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Died 

1642. Newton, Sir Isaac, 178. .1727 

1725. Newton, John, 208. 1807 

FL 1250. Nicholas of Guildford, 50. , 

FI. 1390. Nicholas of Hereford, 57 

153s? .....North, Sir Thomas, 117.... 1601? 

1532 Norton, Thomas, 75, 129 „ 1584 

1653 Oldham, John, 177 <, 1683 

1769. Opie, Amelia, 210 1853 

1075. .0 .Ordericus Vitalis, 39 1143? 

Fl. 1200. . . . o. . . .Orrmin, 42 

Oswald of Worcester, 28 972 

1652 o . . .Otway, Thomas, 194 1685 

1581 .Overbury, Sir Thomas, 153 ..1613 

1737. Paine, Thomas, 206, 291 , 1809 

1540? Painter, William, 102 1594 

1743. Paley-j William, 208 1805 

1504 Parker, Archbishop, 151 1575 

1823. Parkman, Francis, 300 1893 

1679 . .Pamell, Thomas, 185 , 1718 

1839. Pater, Walter, 272 1894 

1823 Patmore, Coventry, 246 1896 

1791 Payne, John Howard, 311 1852 

1395? . . . Pecock, Reginald, ■jj 1460? 

1558?- • • Peele, George, no, 131, 135 1597? 

1633. Pepys, Samuel, 182 , 1703 

1729. .......... .Percy, Thomas, Bishop, 216, 223 1811 

1623. .......... .Petty, Sir William, 151, 180 1687 

1510? ..Phaer, Thomas, 100 1560 

1675 Phillips, Ambrtise, 187. 1749 

1676 .Phillips, John, 187 1709 

........ .Phreas„ John, 80. 1465 

1809. Poe, Edgar Allan, 294, 318 1849 

1667. . . .... .Pomfret, John, 187 1702 

1500. Pole, Reginald, 104 1558 

1688 Pope, Alexander, 173, 175, 176,181, 184-188, 

190, 198, 200, 213, 216, 219, 222 1744 

1802. Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, 279 1839 

1796 Prescott, William Hickling, 300. 1859 

1664 Prior, Matthew, 177, 185, 187 1721 



INDEX 353 

Born. Died 

1600 Prynne, William, 155 „ 1669 

1577 .Purchas, Samuel, 152 „ 1626 

Fl. 15th century . Purvey, John, 57 , After 1427 

1530? Puttenham, George, 107. 1600? 

1592 , Quarles, Francis, 159 1644 

1764 _ Radcliffe, Ann, 210 1823 

1552 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 114, 115, 152. „ . . 1618 

1686 Ramsay, Allan, 187, 221, 222 1758 

1605 Randolph, Thomas, 148 1634 

1814 Reade, Charles, 264 1884 

1710 Reid, Thomas, 203 1796 

1723 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 199 1792 

1772 Ricardo, David, 209 1823 

1689. Richardson, Samuel, 200 1761 

Ripley, George, 75 1490 

Fl. 1295 Robert of Gloucester, 44 

1721 Robertson, William, 202 1793 

Fl. 1551 Robinson, Ralph, 83 

1647 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 177 1680 

1509? Rogers, John, 85 1555 

1763 Rogers, Samuel, 228, 235 1855 

RoUe, of Hampole, Richard, 38 1349 

1634 Roscommon, Dillon Wentworth, Earl of, 177. . 1684 

1828 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 249, 279 1882 

1830 Rossetti, Christina, 249, 279 1894 

1674 Rowe, Nicholas, 195 1718 

Fl. 17th century. . Rowley, V/illiam, 148 

Poy, William, 85 1531 

1819 Ruskin, John, 270 1900 

1836 Russell, Lady Rachel, 182 1723 

1536 Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, 95, 96, 99, 

100, 129 1608 

St. John, Henry (see Bolingbroke, Lord) 

1577 Sandys, George, 152 1644 

1697 Savage, Richard, 214 1743 

Savile, George (see Halifax, Lord) 

1747 Scott, Thomas, 208 1821 

1771 Scott, Sir Walter, 90, 206, 210-212, 216, 228, 234. 1832 

1639 Sedley, Sir Charles, 177, 194. 1701 

2A 



354 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Died 

1584. o . = , . Selden, John, 151, 152 c . . , . . 1654 

o c , . . . . o , . . .Sellynge, William, 80 

1640 .Shadwell, Thomas, 176, 194. ,0 1692 

1671, Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of, 190 1713 

1564. ...0..0.. . .Shakespeare, William, 82, 90, 96, 98, 117-121, 

130-142, 161, 170-172, 193, 212, 216, 218 1616 

1792. o , . . o Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 228, 236, 238-244. . . 1822 

1714. Shenstone, William, 216, 221 , 1763 

1751 ......00..,. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 195 1816 

1641 o . .Sherlock, William, 179. o 1707 

1596 Shirley, James, 148, 160 , 1666 

Fl. 1440 Shirley,, John, 78 

1577. Sibbes, Richard, 154, 1635 

1622 .Sidney, Algernon, 180 1683 

1554. Sidney, Sir Philip, 102, 106-108, in, 115, 119. . 1586 

Fl. nth and ) _. ^ ^^ , 

> ..Simeon of Durham, 39 

I2th centuries 3 

1460? ........... Skelton, John, 79, 87, 88, 95 1528? 

1722. ........... Smart, Christopher, 221 1771 

1723. .Smith, Adam, 204 1790 

1512. Smith, Sir Thomas, 82. .... , 1577 

1771. ... .... Smith, Sydney, 207 1845 

1721. ....... Smollett, Tobias, 201 ..1771 

1633. ....... Southj Robert, 179 1716 

1660. .Southeme, Thomas, 194 1746 

1774. Southey, Robert, 207, 209, 227-229 1843 

1560?. Southwell, Robert, 118 1595 

1552 .Speed, John, 151 .1629 

1562., Spelman, Sir Henry, 151 , 1641 

1820 o . . . . . .Spencer, Herbert, 275 

1552?... ..Spenser, Edmund, 91, 95,99, 107, 110-117,119, 

122, 157, 170, 216, 222. 1599 

1672. .......... .Steele, Sir Richard, 191, 192 1729 

1713. Sterne, Laurence, 201, 202 1763 

1850 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 266 1894 

1753 Stewart, Dugald, 208 1828 

1635 .Stillingfleet, Edward, 179 .1699 

1567?. , Stirling, Sir William Alexander, Earl of, 124, 

157 1640 

1525 Stow, John, 102, 152 1605 

1811 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 295 .1896 



INDEX 355 

Born. Diee. 

1609. . o ....... . .Suckling, Sir John, 148, 158. .1642 

1516? Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 86, 88, 95-97. .1547 

1667. Swift, Jonathan, 183, 185, 188, 189, 198 1745 

1837 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 279 

1613 Taylor, Jeremy, 153 1667 

1628 .Temple, Sir William, 182, 191 .... 1699 

1809 Tennyson, Alfred, 5, 7, 20, 41, 67, 224, 244, 246, 

247, 276 1892 

1811 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 262. . ... .1863 

1688 Theobald, Lewis, 185, 216 1744 

1797. .Thirwall, Connop, 270 -1875 

1225?. ..... .Thomas of Erceldoune, 91. .................. . .1300? 

1700 Thomson, James, 94, 157, 188, 219, 235. ........ 1748 

1817 .Thoreau, Henry David, 304 1862 

1686 Tickell, Thomas, 187 . 1740 

1891 Ticknor, George, 306 1871 

1630. Tillotson, John, Archbishop, 179. .1694 

1656 . .Tindal, Matthew, 190 , 1733 

1670 Toland, John, 190 , 1722 

Fl. 1551 Tottel, Richard, 97, 100 

FI. 1600-1613. . . .Tourneur, Cyril, 143 

1815 Trollope, Anthony, 264 1882 

1530? Turbervile, George, loi, 102 iS94? 

1808. Turner, Charles Tennyson, 246 1879 

Turpin, Archbishop, 45 ». 

1526? Tusser, Thomas, 97 1580 

1484? Tyndale, William, 83, 84 1536 

1820. o Tyndall, John, 275 1893 

1505. Udall, Nicholas, 129. 1556 

1580 , Ussher, Archbishop, 15 1656 

1666?. . , Vanbrugh, Sir John, 194 1726 

1621 ..Vaughan, Henry, 159, 219. 1693 

1120? Wace, 41 . 1184? 

1822 .Wa'jace, Alfred Russel, 274. 

1605 Waller, Edmund, 159, 172, 173. 1687 

1616 Wallis, John, 151 ... 1703 

1717 Walpole, Horace, 199 1797 



350 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Dieu 

1676. . „ Walpole, Sir Robert, 197 1745 

1593 Walton, Izaak, 155, 182 , 1683 

1698. .0 Warburton, William, Bishop, 185, 190, 216 1779 

1460. Warham, Archbishop, 82 1532 

1558? .Warner, William, 121 1609 

1722 Warton, Joseph, 220 1800 

1728. Warton, Thomas, 207, 216, 220. o , 1790 

1732 Washington, George, 290 .1799 

Fl. i6th century. Webbe, William, 107 <, , 

1582? Webster, John, 144, 146. .... o ... .0. o .... » 1652? 

1782. Webster, Daniel, 298 , . . . . . 1852 

1708 o . .Wesley, Charles, 224. ...,.„ 1788 

1703 Wesley, John, 208 o. .... = .... . .1791 

1714 Whitfield, George, 208 1770 

1720 White, Gilbert, 200 1793 

1819 Whitman, Walt, 320 1892 

1807. Whittier, John Greenleaf, 314. 1892 

1727 Wilkes, John, 197 -1797 

1095? .William of Malmesbury, 39. .1142? 

Fl. 1327 William of Shoreham, 38 

Fl. 13th century. William of Waddington, 38. 

1785 Wilson, Professor John (Christopher North), 

207 1854 

1520?. . . . o Wilson, Thomas, 97 1581 

1588. Wither George 157, 159, 161. 1667 

1659 Wollaston, William, 190 1724 

Worcester, John Tiptof t, Earl of, 79 1470 

1770. Wordsworth, William, 92, 118, 207, 221, 223, 225, 

227, 230-234, 239, 243 1850 

1568 Wotton, Sir Henry, 92, 123, 152 1639 

Fl. 1002-1023. . . . Wulfstan, Archbishop, 29 

1503 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 86, 88, 95, 96 1542 

1640?. ......... . Wycherley, William, 194 1715 

1320? .Wyclif, John, 52. 53- 57- • • • 1384 

1681........0... Young, Edward, 213 o. 1765 



I 



INDEX TO FOREIGN AUTHORS 



1313 Boccaccio, 61, 62, 74, 80, 99. . <, . « ..... 1375 

1434 Boiardo, no. o.....,..,...,. .1494 

1636 Boileau, 172 1711 

Calprenede, 192 , , 1663 

1424 Chalcondylas, 82 1511 

Fl. nth century. .Chrestien of Troyes, 44 

106 B.c Cicero, 94, 100 43 B.C. 

Contarini, 104 1550 

1606 Corneille, 192 1684 

1717... D'Alembert, 197 0......0... <,...,,. .1783 

1265 Dante, 61, 62, 70 ,. 1321 

Dares Phrygius, 47 

385 B.C Demosthenes, 100 322 B.c 

Dictys Cretensis, 47 

1713 Diderot, 197 1784 

1749 .Goethe, 198, 206, 211 1832 

13th century Guido delle Colonne, 47 

Homer, 117, 143, 186, 224 

65 B.c Horace, 163 .....o... 08 B.C. 

1621 La Fontaine, 172 0...1695 

1729 Lessing, 192, 205 1781 

1496.... Marot, III .....,, = ..,.......1544 

1280? .Meung, Jean de, 59 ..... , 

357 



358 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Died. 

1622 Moliere, 193 1673 

1533 Montaigne, 117, 191 = ..1592 

1689 Montesquieu, 197, 202 1755 

43 B.c Ovid, 94, 100 17 A.p. 

1304 Petrarca, 58, 61, 80, 96, 116. . , 1374 

427 B.c Plato, 96 347 B.c 

Fl. 50-100 Plutarch, 100 

1639 Racine, 193 £699 

Fl. i2th century. .Robert of Boron, 44 

1712 Rousseau, 197 1778 

1458 Sannazaro, 102 1530 

1759 , Schiller, 198 1805 

1601 Scudery, 192 1667 

Fl. 930 Skallagrimsson, Egil, 24 

45? Statius, 47 96? 

1544 Tasso, no, 116 1595 

70 B.c Virgil, 7, 47, 93, 96, 100, 177 19 B.c, 

1694 .Voltaire, 132, 135, 195, 197, 202. 1778 



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